Entanglement in non-critical inhomogeneous quantum chains

Abstract

We study an inhomogeneous critical Ising chain in a transverse field whose couplings decay exponentially from the center. In the strong inhomogeneity limit we apply Fisher's renormalization group to show that the ground state is formed by concentric singlets similar to those of the rainbow state of the XX model. In the weak inhomogeneity limit we map the model to a massless Majorana fermion living in a hyperbolic spacetime, where, using CFT techniques, we derive the entanglement entropy that is violated linearly. We also study an inhomogeneous non-critical Ising model that for weak inhomogeneity is mapped to a massive Majorana fermion, while for strong inhomogeneity regime it exhibits trivial and non-trivial topological phases and a separation between regions with high and low entanglement. We also present the entanglement Hamiltonian of the model.