Entanglement entropy scaling in critical phases of 1D quasiperiodic systems

TL;DR

This paper investigates how entanglement entropy scales in one-dimensional quasiperiodic fermionic systems, revealing non-universal behavior without pairing and universal scaling with a coefficient of about 1/6 when pairing induces topological phases.

Contribution

It provides a detailed analysis of entanglement entropy scaling in quasiperiodic systems, highlighting the effects of pairing and topological transitions on critical behavior.

Findings

Entanglement entropy scales logarithmically with subsystem size in critical phases.

The entropy coefficient is non-universal without pairing, depending on model parameters.

With pairing, the coefficient approaches 1/6 at topological critical points.

Abstract

We study the scaling of the entanglement entropy in different classes of one-dimensional fermionic quasiperiodic systems with and without pairing, focusing on multifractal critical points/phases. We find that the entanglement entropy scales logarithmically with the subsystem size $N_{A}$ with a proportionality coefficient $\mathcal{C}$, as in homogeneous critical points, apart from possible additional small oscillations. In the absence of pairing, we find that the entanglement entropy coefficient $\mathcal{C}$ is non-universal and depends significantly and non-trivially both on the model parameters and electron filling, in multifractal critical points. In some of these points, $\mathcal{C}$ can take values close to the homogeneous (or ballistic) system, although it typically takes smaller values. We find a close relation between the behaviour of the entanglement entropy and the small-$q$ (long-wavelength) dependence of the momentum structure factor $\mathcal{S}(q)$. $\mathcal{S}(q)$ increases linearly with q as in the homogeneous case, with a slope that grows with $\mathcal{C}$. In the presence of pairing, we find that even the addition of small anomalous terms affects very significantly the scaling of the entanglement entropy compared to the unpaired case. In particular, we focused on topological phase transitions for which the gap closes with either extended or critical multifractal states. In the former case, the scaling of the entanglement entropy mirrors the behaviour observed at the critical points of the homogeneous Kitaev chain, while in the latter, it shows only slight deviations arising at small length scales. In contrast with the unpaired case, we always observe $\mathcal{C}\approx1/6$ for different critical points, the known value for the homogeneous Kitaev chain with periodic boundary conditions.