Effect of Single Impurity on Free Fermion Entanglement Entropy

Abstract

The one-dimensional free Fermi gas is a prototype conformally invariant system, whose entanglement properties are well-understood. In this work, the effects of a single impurity on one dimensional free fermion entanglement entropy are studied both analytically and numerically. Such an impurity represents an exactly marginal perturbation to the bulk conformally invariant fixed point. We find that the impurity leads to sub-leading contributions to the entanglement entropy that scale inversely with the subsystem size. The origin of such contributions are identified.