3 research outputs found
Entanglement in quantum critical phenomena
Quantum phase transitions occur at zero temperature and involve the
appearance of long-range correlations. These correlations are not due to
thermal fluctuations but to the intricate structure of a strongly entangled
ground state of the system. We present a microscopic computation of the scaling
properties of the ground-state entanglement in several 1D spin chain models
both near and at the quantum critical regimes. We quantify entanglement by
using the entropy of the ground state when the system is traced down to
spins. This entropy is seen to scale logarithmically with , with a
coefficient that corresponds to the central charge associated to the conformal
theory that describes the universal properties of the quantum phase transition.
Thus we show that entanglement, a key concept of quantum information science,
obeys universal scaling laws as dictated by the representations of the
conformal group and its classification motivated by string theory. This
connection unveils a monotonicity law for ground-state entanglement along the
renormalization group flow. We also identify a majorization rule possibly
associated to conformal invariance and apply the present results to interpret
the breakdown of density matrix renormalization group techniques near a
critical point.Comment: 5 pages, 2 figure
Mean Field Approximations and Multipartite Thermal Correlations
The relationship between the mean-field approximations in various interacting
models of statistical physics and measures of classical and quantum
correlations is explored. We present a method that allows us to bound the total
amount of correlations (and hence entanglement) in a physical system in thermal
equilibrium at some temperature in terms of its free energy and internal
energy. This method is first illustrated using two qubits interacting through
the Heisenberg coupling, where entanglement and correlations can be computed
exactly. It is then applied to the one dimensional Ising model in a transverse
magnetic field, for which entanglement and correlations cannot be obtained by
exact methods. We analyze the behavior of correlations in various regimes and
identify critical regions, comparing them with already known results. Finally,
we present a general discussion of the effects of entanglement on the
macroscopic, thermodynamical features of solid-state systems. In particular, we
exploit the fact that a dimensional quantum system in thermal equilibrium
can be made to corresponds to a d+1 classical system in equilibrium to
substitute all entanglement for classical correlations.Comment: 17 pages, 6 figure
Quantum Entanglement in Second-quantized Condensed Matter Systems
The entanglement between occupation-numbers of different single particle
basis states depends on coupling between different single particle basis states
in the second-quantized Hamiltonian. Thus in principle, interaction is not
necessary for occupation-number entanglement to appear. However, in order to
characterize quantum correlation caused by interaction, we use the eigenstates
of the single-particle Hamiltonian as the single particle basis upon which the
occupation-number entanglement is defined. Using the proper single particle
basis, we discuss occupation-number entanglement in important eigenstates,
especially ground states, of systems of many identical particles. The
discussions on Fermi systems start with Fermi gas, Hatree-Fock approximation,
and the electron-hole entanglement in excitations. The entanglement in a
quantum Hall state is quantified as -fln f-(1-f)ln(1-f), where f is the proper
fractional part of the filling factor. For BCS superconductivity, the
entanglement is a function of the relative momentum wavefunction of the Cooper
pair, and is thus directly related to the superconducting energy gap. For a
spinless Bose system, entanglement does not appear in the
Hatree-Gross-Pitaevskii approximation, but becomes important in the Bogoliubov
theory.Comment: 11 pages. Journal versio