In a seminal paper [Phys.Rev.Lett. 71, 1291 (1993)], Page proved that the entanglement entropy of typical pure states is [/latex], for
, where
and
are the Hilbert space dimensions of the subsystem and the system, respectively. Typical pure states are hence (nearly) maximally entangled. We introduce new tools to compute the average entanglement entropy
of all eigenstates for quadratic fermionic Hamiltonians. With this, we prove that
is an upper bound for translationally invariant quadratic Hamiltonians in any dimension. Consequently, typical eigenstates of such Hamiltonians are qualitatively different from typical pure states: they are not maximally entangled if the subsystem size is a finite fraction of the system size. We also prove that, in the limit in which the subsystem size is a vanishing fraction of the system size, the average entanglement entropy is maximal. We compare our predictions with numerical results for free fermions on a circle.
08/03/2017
Entanglement Entropy of Typical Eigenstates of Translationally Invariant Quadratic Hamiltonians
Lev Vidmar, LFH, Eugenio Bianchi, Marcos Rigol