Entanglement entropy of ground states of the Landau Hamiltonian on the half-plane

Abstract

We study the entanglement entropy (EE) of ground states of a Hamiltonian defined on a domain with a boundary. Surprisingly, boundary conditions can change the spectrum and the nature of the spectrum drastically but not the leading behaviour of the EE. As is well-known, the Landau Hamiltonian on the full plane has pure point spectrum (the infinitely degenerate Landau levels) and ground states display a so-called strict area law. On the other hand, the Landau Hamiltonian on the half-plane has purely absolutely continuous spectrum and yet we prove a strict area law for its ground states. We raise the question of what extra or finer conditions on the absolutely continuous spectrum are necessary to guarantee a logarithmically enhanced area-law as we have for the Laplace operator.