Half-chain Entanglement Entropy Research Articles

Identifying many-body localization transition through global quantum discord

We investigate the many-body localization (MBL) transitions in a spin-1/2 Heisenberg chain with an on-site random magnetic field by employing global quantum discord (GQD). We use the disorder-averaged GQD to estimate the MBL critical point, which is found to be around at by making a finite-size scaling analysis. We further compare our results of GQD with those of half-chain entanglement entropy (EE) that is promising in the study of MBL. We show that GQD can exclude the finite-size interference under the same condition, which implies that GQD is more robust than the half-chain EE in characterizing MBL.

Emergent conservation in the Floquet dynamics of integrable non-Hermitian models

We study the dynamics of a class of integrable non-Hermitian free-fermionic models driven periodically using a continuous drive protocol characterized by an amplitude $g_1$ and frequency $\omega_D$. We derive an analytic, albeit perturbative, Floquet Hamiltonian for describing such systems using Floquet perturbation theory with $g_1^{-1}$ being the perturbation parameter. Our analysis indicates the existence of special drive frequencies at which an approximately conserved quantity emerges. The presence of such an almost conserved quantity is reflected in the dynamics of the fidelity, the correlation functions and the half-chain entanglement entropy of the driven system. In addition, it also controls the nature of the steady state of the system. We show that one-dimensional (1D) transverse field Ising model, with an imaginary component of the transverse field, serves as an experimentally relevant example of this phenomenon. In this case, the transverse magnetization is approximately conserved; this conservation leads to complete suppression of oscillatory features in the transient dynamics of fidelity, magnetization, and entanglement of the driven chain at special drive frequencies. We discuss the nature of the steady state of the Ising chain near and away from these special frequencies, demonstrate the protocol independence of this phenomenon by showing its existence for discrete drive protocols, and suggest experiments which can test our theory.

Identifying many-body localization transitions in a random-field Heisenberg chain via quantum nonlocality

Characterizing the many-body localization (MBL) transition and revealing its inherent mechanisms from the ergodic phase to the localized phase is an increasing interest issue. In this paper, we use quantum nonlocality, the hierarchy of multipartite correlations, to identify the MBL transition in an XXZ spin chain with random on-site magnetic fields. We use the shift-invert exact diagonalization method to explore the properties of two-qubit nonlocality and multipartite nonlocality in the many-body localized system. We then use their first derivatives to estimate the critical disorder strength, which is found to be range in hc/J∈[3,4]. Correspondingly, two quantities and their first derivatives, the energy level statistics and the half-chain entanglement entropy that are promising for the study of the MBL transition, are also investigated and as comparisons to quantum nonlocality.

Normal and abnormal thermalization indicators in a one-dimensional low-density Jaynes-Cummings Hubbard model with and without dipole-dipole interaction.

In the one-dimensional low-density Jaynes-Cummings Hubbard (JCH) model, we find that when the hopping strength is much smaller than the coupling strength, the average restricted energy gap ratio exhibits an abnormal statistical behavior that is neither a Poisson nor a Gaussian orthogonal ensemble. But the average half-chain entanglement entropy exhibits ergodicity, and the eigenstate thermalization hypothesis (ETH) is valid for the observable. These results are quite different from those of the standard JCH model. In addition, when the hopping and the coupling strengths are of the same order, quantum chaos still appears in the low-density JCH model, which is in contrast to the integrability of the one-dimensional hard-core bosons. Finally, the dipole-dipole interaction breaks the particle-hole symmetry and leads the abnormal statistical properties to be closer to those of the integrable system at the weak hopping strength limit, but the quantum chaos properties cannot be affected when the hopping strength is of the same order as the coupling strength. Our results demonstrate the counterintuitive behavior in the low-density JCH model and explain the physics behind them from the perspective of the energy spectrum.

Excited-eigenstate entanglement properties of XX spin chains with random long-range interactions

Quantum information theoretical measures are useful tools for characterizing quantum dynamical phases. However, employing them to study excited states of random spin systems is a challenging problem. Here, we report results for the entanglement entropy (EE) scaling of excited eigenstates of random XX antiferromagnetic spin chains with long-range (LR) interactions decaying as a power law with distance with exponent $\alpha$. To this end, we extend the real-space renormalization group technique for excited states (RSRG-X) to solve this problem with LR interaction. For comparison, we perform numerical exact diagonalization (ED) calculations. From the distribution of energy level spacings, as obtained by ED for up to $N\sim 18$ spins, we find indications of a delocalization transition at $\alpha_c \approx 1$ in the middle of the energy spectrum. With RSRG-X and ED, we show that for $\alpha>\alpha^*$ the entanglement entropy (EE) of excited eigenstates retains a logarithmic divergence similar to the one observed for the ground state of the same model, while for $\alpha<\alpha^*$ EE displays an algebraic growth with the subsystem size $l$, $S_l\sim l^{\beta}$, with $0<\beta<1$. We find that $\alpha^* \approx 1$ coincides with the delocalization transition $\alpha_c$ in the middle of the many-body spectrum. An interpretation of these results based on the structure of the RG rules is proposed, which is due to {\it rainbow} proliferation for very long-range interactions $\alpha\ll 1$. We also investigate the effective temperature dependence of the EE allowing us to study the half-chain entanglement entropy of eigenstates at different energy densities, where we find that the crossover in EE occurs at $\alpha^* < 1$.

Long-range-ordered phase in a quantum Heisenberg chain with interactions beyond nearest neighbors

Spin ensembles coupled to optical cavities provide a powerful platform for engineering synthetic quantum matter. Recently, we demonstrated that cavity mediated infinite range interactions can induce fast scrambling in a Heisenberg $XXZ$ spin chain (Phys. Rev. Research {\bf 2}, 043399 (2020)). In this work, we analyze the kaleidoscope of quantum phases that emerge in this system from the interplay of these interactions. Employing both analytical spin-wave theory as well as numerical DMRG calculations, we find that there is a large parameter regime where the continuous $U(1)$ symmetry of this model is spontaneously broken and the ground state of the system exhibits $XY$ order. This kind of symmetry breaking and the consequent long range order is forbidden for short range interacting systems by the Mermin-Wagner theorem. Intriguingly, we find that the $XY$ order can be induced by even an infinitesimally weak infinite range interaction. Furthermore, we demonstrate that in the $U(1)$ symmetry broken phase, the half chain entanglement entropy violates the area law logarithmically. Finally, we discuss a proposal to verify our predictions in state-of-the-art quantum emulators.

Many-Body Critical Phase: Extended and Nonthermal.

The transition between ergodic and many-body localization (MBL) phases lies at the heart of understanding quantum thermalization of many-body systems. Here, we predict a many-body critical (MBC) phase with finite-size scaling analysis in the one-dimensional extended Aubry-André-Harper-Hubbard model, which is different from both the ergodic phase and MBL phase, implying that the quantum system hosts three different fundamental phases in the thermodynamic limit. The level statistics in the MBC phase are well characterized by the so-called critical statistics, and the wave functions exhibit deep multifractal behavior only in the critical region. We further study the half-chain entanglement entropy and thermalization properties and show that the former, in the MBC phase, manifest a volume law scaling, while the many-body states violate the eigenstate thermalization hypothesis. The results are confirmed by the state-of-the-art numerical calculations with system size up to L=22. This work unveils a novel many-body phase which is extended but nonthermal.

Phase transitions in the one-dimensional ionic Hubbard model

We study quantum phase transitions by measuring the bond energy, the number density, and the half-chain entanglement entropy in the one-dimensional ionic Hubbard model. By using the matrix product operator to perform the infinite density matrix renormalization group, we obtain the ground states in the canonical form of matrix product states. Depending on the chemical potential and the staggered potential, the number density and the half-chain entanglement entropy shows clear signatures of a Mott transition. Our results confirm the success of using the matrix product operator method to investigate itinerant fermion systems.

Nonergodic behavior of the clean Bose-Hubbard chain

We study ergodicity breaking in the clean Bose-Hubbard chain for small hopping strength. We see the existence of a non-ergodic regime by means of indicators as the half-chain entanglement entropy of the eigenstates, the average level spacing ratio, {the properties of the eigenstate-expectation distribution of the correlation and the scaling of the Inverse Participation Ratio averages.} We find that this ergodicity breaking {is different from many-body localization} because the average half-chain entanglement entropy of the eigenstates obeys volume law. This ergodicity breaking appears unrelated to the spectrum being organized in quasidegenerate multiplets at small hopping and finite system sizes, so in principle it can survive also for larger system sizes. We find that some imbalance oscillations in time which could mark the existence of a glassy behaviour in space are well described by the dynamics of a single symmetry-breaking doublet and {quantitatively} captured by a perturbative effective XXZ model. We show that the amplitude of these oscillations vanishes in the large-size limit. {Our findings are numerically obtained for systems with $L < 12$. Extrapolations of our scalings to larger system sizes should be taken with care, as discussed in the paper.

Statistically related many-body localization in the one-dimensional anyon Hubbard model

Many-body localization (MBL) has been widely investigated for both fermions and bosons, it is, however, much less explored for anyons. Here we numerically calculate several physical characteristics related to MBL of a one-dimensional disordered anyon-Hubbard model in both localized and delocalized regions. We figure out a logarithmically slow growth of the half-chain entanglement entropy and an area-law rather than volume-law obedience for the highly excited eigenstates in the MBL phase. The adjacent energy level gap-ratio parameter is calculated and is found to exhibit a Poisson-like probability distribution in the deep MBL phase. By studying a hybridization parameter, we reveal an intriguing effect that the statistics can induce localization-delocalization transition. Several physical quantities, such as the half-chain entanglement, the adjacent energy level gap-ratio parameter, {\color{black} the long-time limit of the particle imbalance}, and the critical disorder strength, are shown to be non-monotonically dependent on the anyon statistical angle. Furthermore, a feasible scheme based on the spectroscopy of energy levels is proposed for the experimental observation of these statistically related properties.

Many-body localization in XY spin chains with long-range interactions: An exact-diagonalization study

We investigate the transition from the many-body localized phase to the ergodic thermalized phase at an infinite temperature in an $XY$ spin chain with $L$ spins, which experiences power-law decaying interactions in the form of $V_{ij}\propto1/\left|i-j\right|^{\alpha}$ ($i,j=1,\cdots,L$) and a random transverse field. By performing large-scale exact diagonalization for the chain size up to $L=18$, we systematically analyze the energy gap statistics, half-chain entanglement entropy, and uncertainty of the entanglement entropy of the system at different interaction exponents $\alpha$. The finite-size critical scaling allows us to determine the critical disorder strength $W_{c}$ and critical exponent $\nu$ at the many-body localization phase transition, as a function of the interaction exponent $\alpha$ in the limit $L\rightarrow\infty$. We find that both $W_{c}$ and $\nu$ diverge when $\alpha$ decreases to a critical power $\alpha_{c}\simeq1.16\pm0.17$, indicating the absence of many-body localization for $\alpha<\alpha_{c}$. Our result is useful to resolve the contradiction on the critical power found in two previous studies, $\alpha_{c}=3/2$ from scaling argument in Phys. Rev. B \textbf{92}, 104428 (2015) and $\alpha_{c}\approx1$ from quantum dynamics simulation in Phys. Rev. A \textbf{99}, 033610 (2019).

Strong Odd Bond - Weak Even Bond Picture in the Half-Filled One-Dimensional Hubbard Model

We study the strong odd bond - weak even bond picture by measuring the bond energy and the half-chain entanglement entropy in the one-dimensional Hubbard model. By using the infinite density matrix renormalization group with matrix product operator, we obtain the ground state of the matrix product state. As a function of the bond dimension, the bond energy and the half-chain entanglement entropy support the strong odd bond - weak even bond picture. From the expectation values of the occupation number, we numerically observe that the odd - even effect appears only for the half-filling case with a finite bond dimension. Our results confirm that the matrix product operator method is successful in exploring itinerant fermionic systems.

Entanglement across extended random defects in the XX spin chain

We study the half-chain entanglement entropy in the ground state of the spin-1/2 XX chain across an extended random defect, where the strength of disorder decays with the distance from the interface algebraically as . In the whole regime , the average entanglement entropy is found to increase logarithmically with the system size L as , where the effective central charge depends on κ. In the regime , where the extended defect is a relevant perturbation, the strong-disorder renormalization group method gives , while, in the regime , where the extended defect is irrelevant in the bulk, numerical results indicate a non-zero effective central charge, which increases with κ. The variation of is thus found to be non-monotonic and discontinuous at .

Deformed Fredkin spin chain with extensive entanglement

We introduce a new spin chain which is a deformation of the Fredkin spin chain and has a phase transition between bounded and extensive entanglement entropy scaling. In this chain, spins have a local interaction of three nearest neighbors. The Hamiltonian is frustration-free and its ground state can be described analytically as a weighted superposition of Dyck paths that depends on a deformation parameter t. In the purely spin 1/2 case, whenever , the entanglement entropy obeys an area law: it is bounded from above by a constant, when the size of the block n increases. When a local color degree of freedom is introduced and t > 1 the entanglement entropy increases linearly, while for t < 1 an area law is obeyed. The half-chain entanglement entropy is tightly bounded by where 2n is the length of the chain, and s is the number of colors. Our chain fosters a new example for a significant boost to entropy and for the existence of the associated critical rainbow phase where the entanglement entropy scales with volume that discovered by Zhang, Ahmadain and Klich (Proc. Natl Acad. Sci 2017).

The gap of the area-weighted Motzkin spin chain is exponentially small

We prove that the energy gap of the model proposed by Zhang et al (2016 arXiv:1606.07795) is exponentially small in the square of the system size. In Movassagh and Shor (2016 Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA) a class of exactly solvable quantum spin chain models was proposed that have integer spins (s), with a nearest neighbors Hamiltonian, and a unique ground state. The ground state can be seen as a uniform superposition of all s-colored Motzkin walks. The half-chain entanglement entropy provably violates the area law by a square root factor in the system’s size (∼) for s > 1. For s = 1, the violation is logarithmic (Bravyi et al 2012 Phys. Rev. Lett. 109 207202). Moreover in Movassagh and Shor (2016 Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA) it was proved that the gap vanishes polynomially and is O(n−c) with .Recently, a deformation of Movassagh and Shor (2016 Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA), which we call ‘weighted Motzkin quantum spin chain’ was proposed Zhang et al (2016 arXiv:1606.07795). This model has a unique ground state that is a superposition of the s-colored Motzkin walks weighted by with t > 1. The most surprising feature of this model is that it violates the area law by a factor of n. Here we prove that the gap of this model is upper bounded by for t > 1 and s > 1.

Critical Properties of the Many-Body Localization Transition

The transition from a many-body localized phase to a thermalizing one is a dynamical quantum phase transition which lies outside the framework of equilibrium statistical mechanics. We provide a detailed study of the critical properties of this transition at finite sizes in one dimension. We find that the entanglement entropy of small subsystems looks strongly subthermal in the quantum critical regime, which indicates that it varies discontinuously across the transition as the system-size is taken to infinity, even though many other aspects of the transition look continuous. We also study the variance of the half-chain entanglement entropy which shows a peak near the transition, and find substantial variation in the entropy across eigenstates of the same sample. Further, the sample-to-sample variations in this quantity are strongly growing, and larger than the intra-sample variations. We posit that these results are consistent with a picture in which the transition to the thermal phase is driven by an eigenstate-dependent sparse resonant "backbone" of long-range entanglement, which just barely gains enough strength to thermalize the system on the thermal side of the transition as the system size is taken to infinity. This discontinuity in a global quantity --- the presence of a fully functional bath --- in turn implies a discontinuity even for local properties. We discuss how this picture compares with existing renormalization group treatments of the transition.

More on the rainbow chain: entanglement, space-time geometry and thermal states

The rainbow chain is an inhomogenous exactly solvable local spin model that, in its ground state, displays a half-chain entanglement entropy growing linearly with the system size. Although many exact results about the rainbow chain are known, the structure of the underlying quantum field theory has not yet been unraveled. Here we show that the universal scaling features of this model are captured by a massless Dirac fermion in a curved space-time with constant negative curvature R = −h2 (h is the amplitude of the inhomogeneity). This identification allows us to use recently developed techniques to study inhomogeneous conformal systems and to analytically characterise the entanglement entropies of more general bipartitions. These results are carefully tested against exact numerical calculations. Finally, we study the entanglement entropies of the rainbow chain in thermal states, and find that there is a non-trivial interplay between the rainbow effective temperature TR and the physical temperature T.

Entanglement and correlation functions of the quantum Motzkin spin-chain

We present exact results on the exactly solvable spin chain of Bravyi et al. [Phys. Rev. Lett. 109, 207202 (2012)]. This model is a spin one chain and has a Hamiltonian that is local and translationally invariant in the bulk. It has a unique (frustration free) ground state with an energy gap that is polynomially small in the system’s size (2n). The half-chain entanglement entropy of the ground state is 12logn+const.[Bravyi et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 109, 207202 (2012)]. Here we first write the Hamiltonian in the standard spin-basis representation. We prove that at zero temperature, the magnetization is along the z-direction, i.e., ⟨sx⟩=⟨sy⟩=0 (everywhere on the chain). We then analytically calculate ⟨sz⟩ and the two-point correlation functions of sz. By analytically diagonalizing the reduced density matrices, we calculate the Schmidt rank, von Neumann, and Rényi entanglement entropies for the following: 1. Any partition of the chain into two pieces (not necessarily in the middle) and 2. L consecutive spins centered in the middle. Further, we identify entanglement Hamiltonians (Eqs. (49) and (59)). We prove a small lemma (Lemma (1)) on the combinatorics of lattice paths using the reflection principle to relate and calculate the Motzkin walk “height” to spin expected values. We also calculate the, closely related (scaled), correlation functions of Brownian excursions. The known features of this model are summarized in a table in Sec. I.

Many-body localization in Ising models with random long-range interactions

We theoretically investigate the many-body localization phase transition in a one-dimensional Ising spin chain with random long-range spin-spin interactions, $V_{ij}\propto\left|i-j\right|^{-\alpha}$, where the exponent of the interaction range $\alpha$ can be tuned from zero to infinitely large. By using exact diagonalization, we calculate the half-chain entanglement entropy and the energy spectral statistics and use them to characterize the phase transition towards the many-body localization phase at infinite temperature and at sufficiently large disorder strength. We perform finite-size scaling to extract the critical disorder strength and the critical exponent of the divergent localization length. With increasing $\alpha$, the critical exponent experiences a sharp increase at about $\alpha=1$ and then gradually decreases to a value found earlier in a disordered short-ranged interacting spin chain. For $\alpha<1$, we find that the system is mostly localized and the increase in the disorder strength may drive a transition between two many-body localized phases. In contrast, for $\alpha>1$, the transition is from a thermalized phase to the many-body localization phase. Our predictions could be experimentally tested with ion-trap quantum emulator with programmable random long-range interactions, or with randomly distributed Rydberg atoms or polar molecules in lattices.

Half-chain entanglement entropy in the one-dimensional spinless fermion model

We calculate the half-chain entanglement entropy of the ground state in the one-dimensional spinless fermion model. Considering a tiny corner of the Hilbert space represented by matrix product states, we efficiently find the ground state by the infinite time-evolving block decimation. The Schmidt coefficients are used to determine the half-chain entanglement entropy. Using the bond dimension scaling of the half-chain entanglement entropy, we find the critical region, which is consistent with the previous results.