2007/10/31 by V. V. França, K. Capelle · 1 citation
Physics and Astronomy · #cond-mat.str-el #cond-mat.stat-mech #quant-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physrevlett.100.070403
published as Phys. Rev. Lett. 100, 070403 (2008) · revised version (added more impurity data, corrected typos, added discussion) to appear in Phys.Rev.Lett. (2008)
arxiv created 2008/01/17 · arxiv updated 2009/12/01
We investigate entanglement of strongly interacting fermions in spatially inhomogeneous environments. To quantify entanglement in the presence of spatial inhomogeneity, we propose a local-density approximation (LDA) to the entanglement entropy, and a nested LDA scheme to evaluate the entanglement entropy on inhomogeneous density profiles. These ideas are applied to models of electrons in superlattice structures with different modulation patterns, electrons in a metallic wire in the presence of impurities, and phase-separated states in harmonically confined many-fermion systems, such as electrons in quantum dots and atoms in optical traps. We find that the entanglement entropy of inhomogeneous systems is strikingly different from that of homogeneous systems.