Area-law entanglement from quantum geometry

Abstract

Quantum geometry, which encompasses both Berry curvature and the quantum metric, plays a key role in multi-band interacting electron systems. We study the entanglement entropy of a region of linear size $\ell$ in fermion systems with nontrivial quantum geometry, i.e. whose Bloch states have nontrivial $k$ dependence. We show that the entanglement entropy scales as $S = \alpha \ell^{d-1} \ln\ell + \beta \ell^{d-1} + \cdots$ where the first term is the well-known area-law violating term for fermions and $\beta$ contains the leading contribution from quantum geometry. We compute this for the case of uniform quantum geometry and cubic domains and provide numerical results for the Su-Schrieffer-Heeger model, 2D massive Dirac cone, and 2D Chern bands. An experimental probe of the quantum geometric entanglement entropy is proposed using particle number fluctuations. We offer an intuitive account of the area-law entanglement related to the spread of maximally localized Wannier functions.