The absence of the selfaveraging property of the entanglement entropy of disordered free fermions

Abstract

We consider the macroscopic system of free lattice fermions in one dimension assuming that the one-body Hamiltonian of the system is the one dimensional discrete Schrödinger operator with independent identically distributed random potential. We show analytically and numerically that the variance of the entanglement entropy of the segment $[-M,M]$ of the system is bounded away from zero as $M\to \infty$. This manifests the absence of the selfaveraging property of the entanglement entropy in our model, meaning that in the one-dimensional case the complete description of the entanglement entropy is provided by its whole probability distribution. This also may be contrasted the case of dimension two or more, where the variance of the entanglement entropy per unit surface area vanishes as \cite{El-Co:17}, thereby guaranteeing the representativity of its mean for large $M$ in the multidimensional case.

arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1703.06054