Entanglement in fermion systems

TL;DR

This paper develops a framework for quantifying entanglement in fermionic systems, introducing measures like mode entanglement entropy and fermionic concurrence, and provides analytical results for pure and mixed states.

Contribution

It introduces a basis-independent entanglement measure for fermions and derives a closed-form fermionic concurrence for four-level systems, extending previous concepts.

Findings

Entanglement entropy minimized over all bases relates to the one-body density matrix.

A closed expression for fermionic concurrence in four-level systems is derived.

Analytical convex roof extension for mixed states is provided.

Abstract

We analyze the problem of quantifying entanglement in pure and mixed states of fermionic systems with fixed number parity yet not necessarily fixed particle number. The "mode entanglement" between one single-particle level and its orthogonal complement is first considered, and an entanglement entropy for such a partition of a particular basis of the single-particle Hilbert space $\mathcal H$ is defined. The sum over all single-particle modes of this entropy is introduced as a measure of the total entanglement of the system with respect to the chosen basis and it is shown that its minimum over all bases of $\mathcal H$ is a function of the one-body density matrix. Furthermore, we show that if minimization is extended to all bases related through a Bogoliubov transformation, then the entanglement entropy is a function of the generalized one-body density matrix. These results are then used to quantify entanglement in fermion systems with four single-particle levels. For general pure states of such a system a closed expression for the fermionic concurrence is derived, which generalizes the Slater correlation measure defined in [J. Schliemann et al, Phys. Rev. A 64, 022303 (2001)], implying that "particle entanglement" may be seen as minimum "mode entanglement". It is also shown that the entanglement entropy defined before is related to this concurrence by an expression analogous to that of the two-qubit case. For mixed states of this system the convex roof extension of the previous concurrence and entanglement entropy are evaluated analytically, extending the results of previous ref. to general states.