Witnessing Disorder in Quantum Magnets

Abstract

There are no clean samples in nature. Therefore, when we come to discuss the entanglement properties of quantum materials, the effects of disorder must be taken into account. This question is of particular interest for high-entangled phases, such as quantum spin liquids, which lie outside the Landau paradigm for classifying phases of matter. In this work, we explore what experimentally-accessible measures, in the form of concurrence, residual tangle and quantum Fisher information, can teach us about the entanglement in the presence of disorder. As a representative example, we consider the Tomonaga-Luttinger liquids (TLL) and disorder-driven random singlet (RS) phases found in antiferromagnetic quantum spin chains. Using quantum Fisher information and residual tangle, we demonstrate that both TLL and RS phases exhibit multi-partite entanglement. In the case of the RS phase, we attribute this to entanglement localized below a crossover length scale. We further show that the order of disorder average matters in calculating measures like concurrence, and that this can lead to false inferences when interpreting experiment. Nonetheless, correctly interpreted, these witnesses provide useful information about the effects of disorder. We explore how information about the central charge of the TLL can be extracted from the low-temperature behavior of concurrence, and conjecture that this analysis can be extended to the effective central charge of the RS phase. Finally, we establish how RS and TLL phases can be distinguished through the growth of multi-partite entanglement, as witnessed by the equal-time structure factor. These results establish that, used carefully, experiments based on entanglement witnesses can provide important information about quantum spin systems in the presence of disorder.