Pairing in fermionic systems: A quantum information perspective

Abstract

The notion of "paired" fermions is central to important condensed matter phenomena such as superconductivity and superfluidity. While the concept is widely used and its physical meaning is clear there exists no systematic and mathematical theory of pairing which would allow to unambiguously characterize and systematically detect paired states. We propose a definition of pairing and develop methods for its detection and quantification applicable to current experimental setups. Pairing is shown to be a quantum correlation different from entanglement, giving further understanding in the structure of highly correlated quantum systems. In addition, we will show the resource character of paired states for precision metrology, proving that the BCS states allow phase measurements at the Heisenberg limit.

23 pages, 4 figures

References in corpus (12)

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Cited by in corpus (6)

• Dissipative Dynamics and Phase Transitions in Fermionic Systems
• Entanglement in fermion systems and quantum metrology
• Entanglement spectrum and number fluctuations in the spin-partitioned BCS ground state
• One-body information loss in fermion systems
• An experimental proposal to observe non-abelian statistics of Majorana-Shockley fermions in an optical lattice
• Entanglement and algebraic independence in fermion systems