Entanglement in spatially inhomogeneous many-fermion systems

Abstract

We investigate entanglement of strongly interacting fermions in spatially inhomogeneous environments. To quantify entanglement in the presence of spatial inhomogeneity, we propose a local-density approximation (LDA) to the entanglement entropy, and a nested LDA scheme to evaluate the entanglement entropy on inhomogeneous density profiles. These ideas are applied to models of electrons in superlattice structures with different modulation patterns, electrons in a metallic wire in the presence of impurities, and phase-separated states in harmonically confined many-fermion systems, such as electrons in quantum dots and atoms in optical traps. We find that the entanglement entropy of inhomogeneous systems is strikingly different from that of homogeneous systems.

revised version (added more impurity data, corrected typos, added discussion) to appear in Phys.Rev.Lett. (2008)

References in corpus (8)

• Quantum Phase Transitions and Bipartite Entanglement
• Local quantum criticality in confined fermions on optical lattices
• Quantum Monte Carlo study of confined fermions in one-dimensional optical lattices
• Single-Site Entanglement of Fermions at a Quantum Phase Transition
• Luther-Emery Phase and Atomic-Density Waves in a Trapped Fermion Gas
• Entanglement entropy and entanglement witnesses in models of strongly interacting low-dimensional fermions
• Energy gaps and interaction blockade in confined quantum systems
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• The Hubbard model as an approximation to the entanglement in nanostructures
• Interacting fermions in 1D disordered lattices: Exploring localization and transport properties with lattice density-functional theories
• Feasibility of approximating spatial and local entanglement in long-range interacting systems using the extended Hubbard model
• Finite Size Corrections to Entanglement in Quantum Critical Systems
• Universal and nonuniversal contributions to block-block entanglement in many-fermion systems
• Entanglement enhancement in spatially inhomogeneous many-body systems
• Effect of spatial inhomogeneity on the mapping between strongly interacting fermions and weakly interacting spins
• Quantum Correlations in Field Theory and Integrable Systems