Entanglement in fermionic systems

Abstract

The anticommuting properties of fermionic operators, together with the presence of parity conservation, affect the concept of entanglement in a composite fermionic system. Hence different points of view can give rise to different reasonable definitions of separable and entangled states. Here we analyze these possibilities and the relationship between the different classes of separable states. The behavior of the various classes when taking multiple copies of a state is also studied, showing that some of the differences vanish in the asymptotic regime. In particular, in the case of only two fermionic modes all the classes become equivalent in this limit. We illustrate the differences and relations by providing a complete characterization of all the sets defined for systems of two fermionic modes. The results are applied to Gibbs states of infinite chains of fermions whose interaction corresponds to a $XY$ Hamiltonian with transverse magnetic field.