Entanglement entropy of the $\nu=1/2$ composite fermion non-Fermi liquid state

Abstract

The so-called ``non-Fermi liquid'' behavior is very common in strongly correlated systems. However, its operational definition in terms of ``what it is not'' is a major obstacle against theoretical understanding of this fascinating correlated state. Recently there has been much interest in entanglement entropy as a theoretical tool to study non-Fermi liquids. So far explicit calculations have been limited to models without direct experimental realizations. Here we focus on a two dimensional electron fluid under magnetic field and filling fraction $\nu=1/2$, which is believed to be a non-Fermi liquid state. Using the composite fermion (CF) wave-function which captures the $\nu=1/2$ state very accurately, we compute the second R\'enyi entropy using variational Monte-Carlo technique and an efficient parallel algorithm. We find the entanglement entropy scales as $L\log L$ with the length of the boundary $L$ as it does for free fermions, albeit with a pre-factor twice that of the free fermion. We contrast the results against theoretical conjectures and discuss the implications of the results.