Multipartite entanglement in the 1-D spin-$\frac{1}{2}$ Heisenberg Antiferromagnet

TL;DR

This paper links static structure factors to multipartite entanglement in 1D quantum critical systems, showing that entanglement diverges logarithmically at low temperatures in the Heisenberg chain, with implications for experimental probes.

Contribution

It demonstrates that static structure factors can witness finite temperature multipartite entanglement near quantum critical points, enabling entanglement scaling analysis without full dynamical response data.

Findings

Multipartite entanglement diverges as log(1/T)^{3/2} in the Heisenberg chain.

Static structure factors can witness entanglement near quantum critical points.

Predictions verified with conformal field theory and matrix product state simulations.

Abstract

Multipartite entanglement refers to the simultaneous entanglement between multiple subsystems of a many-body quantum system. While multipartite entanglement can be difficult to quantify analytically, it is known that it can be witnessed through the Quantum Fisher information (QFI), a quantity that can also be related to dynamical Kubo response functions. In this work, we first show that the finite temperature QFI can generally be expressed in terms of a static structure factor of the system, plus a correction that vanishes as $T\rightarrow 0$. We argue that this implies that the static structure factor witnesses multipartite entanglement near quantum critical points at temperatures below a characteristic energy scale that is determined by universal properties, up to a non-universal amplitude. Therefore, in systems with a known static structure factor, we can deduce finite temperature scaling of multipartite entanglement and low temperature entanglement depth without knowledge of the full dynamical response function of the system. This is particularly useful to study 1D quantum critical systems in which sub-power-law divergences can dominate entanglement growth, where the conventional scaling theory of the QFI breaks down. The 1D spin-$\frac{1}{2}$ antiferromagnetic Heisenberg model is an important example of such a system, and we show that multipartite entanglement in the Heisenberg chain diverges non-trivially as $\sim \log(1/T)^{3/2}$. We verify these predictions with calculations of the QFI using conformal field theory and matrix product state simulations. Finally we discuss the implications of our results for experiments to probe entanglement in quantum materials, comparing to neutron scattering data in KCuF$_3$, a material well-described by the Heisenberg chain.