Entanglement entropy and mutual information across the Mott transition in the two-dimensional Hubbard model

TL;DR

This paper investigates how entanglement entropy and mutual information reveal the nature of the Mott transition in the 2D Hubbard model, providing insights relevant to cold atom experiments.

Contribution

It demonstrates that entanglement measures can identify the first-order transition, critical endpoint universality, and crossover phenomena in the Hubbard model.

Findings

Entanglement entropy detects the first-order Mott transition.

Mutual information reveals the universality class of the critical endpoint.

Both measures characterize the crossover from the endpoint.

Abstract

Entanglement and information are powerful lenses to probe phases transitions in many-body systems. Motivated by recent cold atom experiments, which are now able to measure the corresponding information-theoretic quantities, we study the Mott transition in the half-filled two-dimensional Hubbard model using cellular dynamical mean-field theory, and focus on two key measures of quantum correlations: entanglement entropy and mutual information. We show that they detect the first-order nature of the transition, the universality class of the endpoint, and the crossover emanating from the endpoint.