Entanglement spectrum of fermionic bilayer honeycomb lattice: Hofstadter butterfly

TL;DR

This paper analytically investigates the energy and entanglement spectra of non-interacting fermionic bilayer honeycomb lattices under various conditions, revealing how trigonal warping, on-site energy differences, and magnetic fields influence their spectral properties and fractal structures.

Contribution

It provides an explicit form of the layer-layer entanglement Hamiltonian and explores how different physical parameters affect the entanglement spectrum and Hofstadter butterfly structure.

Findings

Entanglement spectrum reflects edge states in the absence of trigonal warping.

Trigonal warping disrupts the perfect correspondence between entanglement and energy spectra.

On-site energy difference opens an indirect entanglement gap and alters spectral symmetry.

Abstract

We perform an analytical study of the energy and entanglement spectrum of non-interacting fermionic bilayer honeycomb lattices in the presence of trigonal warping in the energy spectrum, on-site energy difference and uniform magnetic field. Employing single particle correlation functions, we present an explicit form for layer-layer entanglement Hamiltonian whose spectrum is entanglement spectrum. We demonstrate that in the absence of trigonal warping, at zero on-site energy difference exact correspondence is established between entanglement spectrum and energy spectrum of monolayer which means that the entanglement spectrum perfectly reflects the edge state properties of the bilayer. We also show that trigonal warping breaks down such a perfect correspondence, however, in $\Gamma$-K direction in hexagonal Brillouin zone, their behaviors are remarkably the same for particular relevances of hopping parameters. In the presence of an on-site energy difference the symmetry of entanglement spectrum is broken with opening an indirect entanglement gap. We also study the effects of a perpendicular magnetic field on both energy and the entanglement spectrum of the bilayer in the presence of trigonal warping and on-site energy difference. We demonstrate that the entanglement spectrum versus magnetic flux has a self similar fractal structure, known Hofstadter butterfly. Our results also show that the on-site energy difference causes a transition from the Hofstadter butterfly to a tree-like picture.