Regular Article

Entanglement detachment in fermionic systems^★

¹ Dep. de Física Fundamental, Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia (UNED), Madrid, Spain
² Dep. de Física de la Materia Condensada, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Cantoblanco, 28049 Madrid, Spain

^a e-mail: hernan.santos@uam.es

Received: 31 August 2018
Received in final form: 21 September 2018
Published online: 27 November 2018

Abstract

This article introduces and discusses the concept of entanglement detachment. Under some circumstances, enlarging a few couplings of a Hamiltonian can effectively detach a (possibly disjoint) block within the ground state. This detachment is characterized by a sharp decrease in the entanglement entropy between block and environment, and leads to an increase of the internal correlations between the (possibly distant) sites of the block. We provide some examples of this detachment in free fermionic systems. The first example is an edge-dimerized chain, where the second and penultimate hoppings are increased. In that case, the two extreme sites constitute a block which disentangles from the rest of the chain. Further examples are given by (a) a superlattice which can be detached from a 1D chain, and (b) a star-graph, where the extreme sites can be detached or not depending on the presence of an external magnetic field, in analogy with the Aharonov-Bohm effect. We characterize these detached blocks by their reduced matrices, specially through their entanglement spectrum and entanglement Hamiltonian.