Confinement and oscillating deconfinement crossover of two-magnon excitations in quantum spin chains quantified by spin entanglement entropy

TL;DR

This paper introduces spin entanglement entropy as a tool to analyze two-magnon excitations in quantum spin chains, revealing confinement, deconfinement, and many-body effects through scaling laws and oscillations.

Contribution

The study establishes a novel relation between entanglement entropy intercepts and two-magnon distance, and demonstrates confinement-deconfinement crossover in spin chains using EE analysis.

Findings

EE scales as ln N for single magnons

EE intercepts relate to two-magnon distance

Oscillating EE indicates confinement-deconfinement crossover

Abstract

We introduce the spin entanglement entropy (EE) to characterize spin excitations. The scalings of EEs are elaborated as $\ln N$, $\ln N+D_k$ and $2\ln N+D$ for the single-magnon states, two-magnon bound states and two-magnon continuum, respectively, based on the Bethe ansatz solutions of the ferromagnetic spin chain with $N$ sites. The $\ln N$ divergence for the bound states reveals the two magnons emerge as a new quasiparticle. More importantly, the nonzero intercepts ($D_k,D$) embody the many-body effects of two-magnon states. In particular, an exact relation between the intercept of EEs and an observable quantity, the two-magnon distance, is established for the bound states. In such a case, we quantify the two-magnon confinement in a spin system by the increasing entanglement with the distance as a particle physics analogue. Moreover, the EEs can also be used to study the evolution of the excitations. When the bound states are immersed in the continuum in the alternating chain, they undergo an oscillating confinement-deconfinement crossover, shown by the oscillations of the EEs and two-magnon distance with the chain length.