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arXiv:quant-ph/0503219 · Physical Review Letters

Violation of the Entropic Area Law for Fermions

Michael M. Wolf

Published Jan 12, 2006• 473 citations
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Abstract

We investigate the scaling of the entanglement entropy in an infinite translational invariant fermionic system of any spatial dimension. The states under consideration are ground states and excitations of tight-binding Hamiltonians with arbitrary interactions. We show that the entropy of a finite region typically scales with the area of the surface times a logarithmic correction. Thus, in contrast with analogous bosonic systems, the entropic area law is violated for fermions. The relation between the entanglement entropy and the structure of the Fermi surface is discussed, and it is proven that the presented scaling law holds whenever the Fermi surface is finite. This is, in particular, true for all ground states of Hamiltonians with finite range interactions.

DOI
10.1103/physrevlett.96.010404

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We investigate the scaling of the entanglement entropy in an infinite translational invariant fermionic system of any spatial dimension. The states under consideration are ground states and excitations of tight-binding Hamiltonians with arbitrary interactions. We show that the entropy of a finite region typically scales with the area of the surface times a logarithmic correction. Thus, in contrast with analogous bosonic systems, the entropic area law is violated for fermions. The relation between the entanglement entropy and the structure of the Fermi surface is discussed, and it is proven that the presented scaling law holds whenever the Fermi surface is finite. This is, in particular, true for all ground states of Hamiltonians with finite range interactions.
We investigate the scaling of the entanglement entropy in an infinite translational invariant Fermionic system of any spatial dimension. The states under consideration are ground states and excitations of tight-binding Hamiltonians with arbitrary interactions. We show that the entropy of a finite region typically scales with the area of the surface times a logarithmic correction. The latter can be traced back to the criticality of the models. The relation between the entanglement entropy and the structure of the Fermi surface is discussed, and it is proven, that the presented scaling law holds whenever the Fermi surface is finite. This is in particular true for all ground states of Hamiltonians with finite range interactions.
The entanglement entropy of a distinguished region of a quantum many-body system reflects the entanglement in its pure ground state. Here we establish scaling laws for this entanglement in critical quasifree fermionic and bosonic lattice systems, without resorting to numerical means. We consider the setting of D-dimensional half-spaces which allows us to exploit a connection to the one-dimensional case. Intriguingly, we find a difference in the scaling properties depending on whether the system is bosonic-where an area law is proven to hold-or fermionic where we determine a logarithmic correction to the area law, which depends on the topology of the Fermi surface. We find Lifshitz quantum phase transitions accompanied with a nonanalyticity in the prefactor of the leading order term.
Exactly solving a spinless fermionic system in two and three dimensions, we investigate the scaling behavior of the block entropy in critical and noncritical phases. The scaling of the block entropy crucially depends on the nature of the excitation spectrum of the system and on the topology of the Fermi surface. Noticeably, in the critical phases the scaling violates the area law and acquires a logarithmic correction only when a well-defined Fermi surface exists in the system. When the area law is violated, we accurately verify a conjecture for the prefactor of the logarithmic correction, proposed by D. Gioev and I. Klich [Phys. Rev. Lett. 96, 100503 (2006)].
We relate the reduced density matrices of quadratic fermionic and bosonic models to their Green's function matrices in a unified way and calculate the scaling of the entanglement entropy of finite systems in an infinite universe exactly. For critical fermionic two-dimensional (2D) systems at T=0T=0T=0, two regimes of scaling are identified: generically, we find a logarithmic correction to the area law with a prefactor dependence on the chemical potential that confirms earlier predictions based on the Widom conjecture. If, however, the Fermi surface of the critical system is zero-dimensional, then we find an area law with a sublogarithmic correction. For a critical bosonic 2D array of coupled oscillators at T=0T=0T=0, our results show that the entanglement entropy follows the area law without corrections.
Free fermions with a finite Fermi surface are known to exhibit an anomalously large entanglement entropy. The leading contribution to the entanglement entropy of a region of linear size L in d spatial dimensions is S∼L(d-1)logL, a result that should be contrasted with the usual boundary law S∼L(d-1). This term depends only on the geometry of the Fermi surface and on the boundary of the region in question. I give an intuitive account of this anomalous scaling based on a low energy description of the Fermi surface as a collection of one-dimensional gapless modes. Using this picture, I predict a violation of the boundary law in a number of other strongly correlated systems.
We show how the area law for entanglement entropy may be violated by free fermions on a lattice, and we look for conditions leading to the emergence of a volume law. We give an explicit construction of the states with maximal entanglement entropy based on the fact that, once a bipartition of the lattice in two complementary sets AAA and A‾\overline{A}A is given, the states with maximal entanglement entropy (volume law) may be factored into Bell pairs (BPs) formed by two states with support on AAA and A‾\overline{A}A. We then exhibit, for translational invariant fermionic systems on a lattice, a Hamiltonian whose ground state is such that it yields an exact volume law. As expected, the corresponding Fermi surface has a fractal topology. We also provide some examples of fermionic models for which the ground state may have an entanglement entropy SA{S}_{A}SA​ between the area and the volume law, building an explicit example of a one-dimensional free fermion model where ${S}_{A}(L)\ensuremath{\propto}{L}^{\ensuremath{\beta}}$, with $\ensuremath{\beta}$ being intermediate between $\ensuremath{\beta}=0$ (area law) and $\ensuremath{\beta}=1$ (BP state inducing volume law). For this model, the dispersion relation has a ``zigzag'' structure leading to a fractal Fermi surface whose counting box dimension equals, for large lattices, $\ensuremath{\beta}$. Our analysis clearly relates the violation of the area law for the entanglement entropy of the ground state to the emergence of a nontrivial topology of the Fermi surface.