Partial time-reversal transformation and entanglement negativity in fermionic systems

Abstract

Quantum systems are known to exhibit several types of exotic behavior beyond classical physics, including quantum entanglement, which describes a web of nonlocal correlations among the constituents of the system. Despite numerous advances in understanding and quantifying the bipartite entanglement entropy of a pure state, where the whole system is described by a wave function, less is understood about quantum entanglement of a mixed state, where the system is described by a density matrix. The partial transpose of the density matrix, in which one takes the transpose only for a subsystem, and its corresponding entanglement measure -- called the (logarithmic) negativity -- have been introduced as an effective probe for the quantum entanglement in bosonic mixed states. In this work, the authors present a scheme to compute an analog of the entanglement negativity in the fermionic mixed states using a partial time-reversal transformation. Various examples are investigated. In particular, it is shown that the partial time reversal is an intrinsically fermionic construction, in that it can capture the formation of the edge Majorana fermions, while the partial transpose obtained from the bosonic partial transpose through the Jordan-Wigner transformation fails.