Bipartite entanglement entropy of the excited states of the free fermions and the harmonic oscillators

Abstract

We study general entanglement properties of the excited states of the one dimensional translational invariant free fermions and coupled harmonic oscillators. In particular, using the integrals of motion, we prove that these Hamiltonians independent of the gap (mass) has infinite excited states that can be described by conformal field theories with integer or half-integer central charges. In the case of free fermions, we also show that because of the huge degeneracy in the spectrum, even a gapless Hamiltonian can have excited states with an area-law. Finally, we study the universal average entanglement entropy over eigenstates of the Hamiltonian of the free fermions introduced recently in L. Vidmar, et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 119, 020601 (2017) https://link.aps.org/doi/10.1103/PhysRevLett.119.020601 . In particular, using a duality relation, we propose a method which can be useful for experimental measurement of the universal average entanglement entropy. Part of our conclusions can be extended to the quantum spin chains that are associated with the free fermions via Jordan-Wigner(JW) transformation.