Scaling laws of entanglement entropy in fractal dimensions

Abstract

Entanglement entropy scaling links geometry to quantum correlations and diagnoses quantum criticality. Fractal lattices extend this link to noninteger dimensions, where boundary and bulk dimensions are independent. It remains open which dimension governs entropy scaling and how strongly gap closing can enhance it. Nonlocal occupied-state projectors and the lack of translation symmetry obstruct standard methods. We overcome these obstacles and classify free-fermion entropy scaling with bounds set by the hopping across the subsystem boundary: an upper bound from its rank and the spectral gap, and a lower bound from how much it lowers the ground-state energy. With only negative-energy states filled and this energy lowering proportional to the boundary, the entanglement entropy obeys the boundary law $S_X=Θ\left(L_X^{d_{\mathrm b}}\right)$ under a uniform gap and satisfies $L_X^{d_{\mathrm b}}\lesssim S_X\lesssim L_X^{d_{\mathrm b}}\ln L_X$ when the gap closes no faster than algebraically. Here $L_X$ is the subsystem linear size and $d_{\mathrm b}$ the boundary dimension. Half occupation of the chiral zero modes gives a mixed-state entropy $S_X^{\mathrm{mix}}$ with $\max\left\{S_X,z_X\ln2\right\}\leqslant S_X^{\mathrm{mix}}\leqslant S_X+z_X\ln2$, where $z_X$ is the local zero-mode weight; an extensive $z_X$ thus makes $S_X^{\mathrm{mix}}$ follow the bulk dimension.