[quantum-info] Seminar IQC - Tuesday, 17 December 2013 at 1:30PM

[Matthew Fries]

Seminar

Institute for Quantum Computing

Tuesday, 17 December 2013 at 1:30PM

QNC 0101

Entanglement in quantum fluids via quantum Monte Carlo

Chris Herdman

The University of Vermont

Entanglement of spatial bipartitions, used to explore lattice models in condensed matter physics, may be insufficient to fully describe itinerant quantum many-body systems in the continuum. In systems of itinerant particles, one can choose to bipartition into subsets of particles, and define a corresponding particle entanglement. The interplay between spatial and particle entanglement may give insight into the nature of quantum fluids, as well as the quantification of experimentally accessible entanglement. We introduce a procedure to measure the Rényi entanglement entropies of both spatial and particle bipartitions, with general applicability to continuum Hamiltonians via Path Integral Monte Carlo methods. Via direct simulations of interacting bosons in one spatial dimension, we confirm a logarithmic scaling of the single-particle entanglement entropy with the number of particles in the system. The coefficient of this logarithmic scaling increases with interaction strength, saturating to unity in the strongly interacting limit. Additionally, we show that the single-particle entanglement entropy is bounded by the condensate fraction, suggesting a practical route towards its measurement in future experiments.