Valence-bond entanglement entropy of frustrated spin chains

Abstract

We extend the definition of the recently introduced valence-bond entanglement entropy to arbitrary SU(2) wave functions of $S=1/2$ spin systems. Thanks to a reformulation of this entanglement measure in terms of a projection, we are able to compute it with various numerical techniques for frustrated spin models. We provide extensive numerical data for the one-dimensional ${J}_{1}\text{\ensuremath{-}}{J}_{2}$ spin chain where we are able to locate the quantum phase transition by using the scaling of this entropy with the block size. We also systematically compare with the scaling of the von Neumann entanglement entropy. We finally underline that the valence-bond entropy definition does depend on the choice of bipartition so that, for frustrated models, a ``good'' bipartition should be chosen, for instance, according to the Marshall sign.