Entanglement Entropy of Eigenstates of Quadratic Fermionic Hamiltonians

Abstract

In a seminal paper [D. N. Page, Phys. Rev. Lett. 71, 1291 (1993)], Page proved that the average entanglement entropy of subsystems of random pure states is ${S}_{\text{ave}}\ensuremath{\simeq}\mathrm{ln}{\mathcal{D}}_{\mathrm{A}}\ensuremath{-}(1/2){\mathcal{D}}_{\mathrm{A}}^{2}/\mathcal{D}$ for $1\ensuremath{\ll}{\mathcal{D}}_{\mathrm{A}}\ensuremath{\le}\sqrt{\mathcal{D}}$, where ${\mathcal{D}}_{\mathrm{A}}$ and $\mathcal{D}$ are the Hilbert space dimensions of the subsystem and the system, respectively. Hence, typical pure states are (nearly) maximally entangled. We develop tools to compute the average entanglement entropy $⟨S⟩$ of all eigenstates of quadratic fermionic Hamiltonians. In particular, we derive exact bounds for the most general translationally invariant models $\mathrm{ln}{\mathcal{D}}_{\mathrm{A}}\ensuremath{-}(\mathrm{ln}{\mathcal{D}}_{\mathrm{A}}{)}^{2}/\mathrm{ln}\mathcal{D}\ensuremath{\le}⟨S⟩\ensuremath{\le}\mathrm{ln}{\mathcal{D}}_{\mathrm{A}}\ensuremath{-}[1/(2\mathrm{ln}2)](\mathrm{ln}{\mathcal{D}}_{\mathrm{A}}{)}^{2}/\mathrm{ln}\mathcal{D}$. Consequently, we prove that (i) if the subsystem size is a finite fraction of the system size, then $⟨S⟩<\mathrm{ln}{\mathcal{D}}_{\mathrm{A}}$ in the thermodynamic limit; i.e., the average over eigenstates of the Hamiltonian departs from the result for typical pure states, and (ii) in the limit in which the subsystem size is a vanishing fraction of the system size, the average entanglement entropy is maximal; i.e., typical eigenstates of such Hamiltonians exhibit eigenstate thermalization.