No Arabic abstract
The Renyi entanglement entropy in quantum many-body systems can be viewed as the difference in free energy between partition functions with different trace topologies. We introduce an external field $lambda$ that controls the partition function topology, allowing us to define a notion of nonequilibrium work as $lambda$ is varied smoothly. Nonequilibrium fluctuation theorems of the work provide us with statistically exact estimates of the Renyi entanglement entropy. This framework also naturally leads to the idea of using quench functions with spatially smooth profiles, providing us a way to average over lattice scale features of the entanglement entropy while preserving long distance universal information. We use these ideas to extract universal information from quantum Monte Carlo simulations of SU(N) spin models in one and two dimensions. The vast gain in efficiency of this method allows us to access unprecedented system sizes up to 192 x 96 spins for the square lattice Heisenberg antiferromagnet.
The entanglement entropy (EE) can measure the entanglement between a spatial subregion and its complement, which provides key information about quantum states. Here, rather than focusing on specific regions, we study how the entanglement entropy changes with small deformations of the entangling surface. This leads to the notion of entanglement susceptibilities. These relate the variation of the EE to the geometric variation of the subregion. We determine the form of the leading entanglement susceptibilities for a large class of scale invariant states, such as groundstates of conformal field theories, and systems with Lifshitz scaling, which includes fixed points governed by disorder. We then use the susceptibilities to derive the universal contributions that arise due to non-smooth features in the entangling surface: corners in 2d, as well as cones and trihedral vertices in 3d. We finally discuss the generalization to Renyi entropies.
We calculate the bipartite von Neumann and second Renyi entanglement entropies of the ground states of spin-1/2 dimerized Heisenberg antiferromagnets on a square lattice. Two distinct dimerization patterns are considered: columnar and staggered. In both cases, we concentrate on the valence bond solid (VBS) phase and describe such a phase with the bond-operator representation. Within this formalism, the original spin Hamiltonian is mapped into an effective interacting boson model for the triplet excitations. We study the effective Hamiltonian at the harmonic approximation and determine the spectrum of the elementary triplet excitations. We then follow an analytical procedure, which is based on a modified spin-wave theory for finite systems and was originally employed to calculate the entanglement entropies of magnetic ordered phases, and calculate the entanglement entropies of the VBS ground states. In particular, we consider one-dimensional (line) subsystems within the square lattice, a choice that allows us to consider line subsystems with sizes up to $L = 1000$. We combine such a procedure with the results of the bond-operator formalism at the harmonic level and show that, for both dimerized Heisenberg models, the entanglement entropies of the corresponding VBS ground states obey an area law as expected for gapped phases. For both columnar-dimer and staggered-dimer models, we also show that the entanglement entropies increase but do not diverge as the dimerization decreases and the system approaches the Neel--VBS quantum phase transition. Finally, the entanglement spectra associated with the VBS ground states are presented.
We would like to put the area law -- believed to by obeyed by entanglement entropies in the ground state of a local field theory -- to scrutiny in the presence of non-perturbative effects. We study instanton corrections to entanglement entropy in various models whose instanton effects are well understood, including $U(1)$ gauge theory in 2+1 dimensions and false vacuum decay in $phi^4$ theory, and we demonstrate that the area law is indeed obeyed in these models. We also perform numerical computations for toy wavefunctions mimicking the theta vacuum of the (1+1)-dimensional Schwinger model. Our results indicate that such superpositions exhibit no more violation of the area law than the logarithmic behavior of a single Fermi surface.
We introduce for SU(2) quantum spin systems the Valence Bond Entanglement Entropy as a counting of valence bond spin singlets shared by two subsystems. For a large class of antiferromagnetic systems, it can be calculated in all dimensions with Quantum Monte Carlo simulations in the valence bond basis. We show numerically that this quantity displays all features of the von Neumann entanglement entropy for several one-dimensional systems. For two-dimensional Heisenberg models, we find a strict area law for a Valence Bond Solid state and multiplicative logarithmic corrections for the Neel phase.
The partial entanglement entropy (PEE) $s_{mathcal{A}}(mathcal{A}_i)$ characterizes how much the subset $mathcal{A}_i$ of $mathcal{A}$ contribute to the entanglement entropy $S_{mathcal{A}}$. We find one additional physical requirement for $s_{mathcal{A}}(mathcal{A}_i)$, which is the invariance under a permutation. The partial entanglement entropy proposal satisfies all the physical requirements. We show that for Poincare invariant theories the physical requirements are enough to uniquely determine the PEE (or the entanglement contour) to satisfy a general formula. This is the first time we find the PEE can be uniquely determined. Since the solution of the requirements is unique and the textit{PEE proposal} is a solution, the textit{PEE proposal} is justified for Poincare invariant theories.