Electronic entanglement in late transition metal oxides

Abstract

Here we present a study of the entanglement in the electronic structure of the late transition metal monoxides - MnO, FeO, CoO, and NiO - obtained by means of density-functional theory in the local density approximation combined with dynamical mean-field theory (LDA+DMFT). The impurity problem is solved through Exact Diagonalization (ED), which grants full access to the thermally mixed many-body ground state density operator. The quality of the electronic structure is affirmed through a direct comparison between the calculated electronic excitation spectrum and photoemission experiments. Our treatment allows for a quantitative investigation of the entanglement in the electronic structure. Two main sources of entanglement are explicitly resolved through the use of a fidelity based geometrical entanglement measure, and additional information is gained from a complementary entropic entanglement measure. We show that the interplay of crystal field effects and Coulomb interaction causes the entanglement in CoO to take a particularly intricate form.