Universal entanglement signatures of quantum liquids as a guide to fermionic criticality

Abstract

An outstanding challenge involves understanding the many-particle entanglement of liquid states of quantum matter that arise in systems of interacting electrons. The Fermi liquid (FL) in $D$ spatial dimensions shows a violation of the area-law in real-space entanglement entropy of a subsystem (of length $L$), $S_{EE} \sim L^{D-1}\ln L$, widely believed to be a hallmark signature of the ground state of a gapless quantum critical system of interacting fermions. In this work, we apply a $T=0$ renormalisation group approach to a prototype of the FL in momentum (or, $k$)-space, unveiling thereby the RG relevant quantum fluctuations (due to forward and tangential scattering) from which long-range entanglement arises. A similar analysis of non-Fermi liquids such as the 2D marginal Fermi liquid (MFL) and the 1D Tomonaga-Luttinger liquid (TLL) reveals a universal logarithmic violation of the area-law in gapless electronic liquids for a subsystem defined within a $k$-space window (of size $\Lambda$) proximate to the Fermi surface, with a proportionality constant that depends on the nature of the underlying Fermi surface. We extend this analysis to the gapped quantum liquids emergent from the destabilisation of the Fermi surface by quantum fluctuations arising from backscattering processes. Indeed, we find that the $k$-space entanglement signatures of gapped quantum liquids appear to be governed by the nature of the Fermi surface (e.g., nested or not) from which they emerge, as well as the nature of their parent gapless metallic liquid (e.g., FL, MFL etc.). This is confirmed by our finding an enhanced entanglement entropy for the nodal MFL present at the quantum critical point recently discovered in the 2D Hubbard model at optimal hole-doping. Our work thus paves the way for an entanglement based classification of quantum liquids emergent from the criticality of interacting fermionic matter.