Entanglement, noise, and the cumulant expansion.

We put forward a simpler and improved variation of a recently proposed method to overcome the signal-to-noise problem found in Monte Carlo calculations of the entanglement entropy of interacting fermions. The present method takes advantage of the approximate log-normal distributions that characterize the signal-to-noise properties of other approaches. In addition, we show that a simple rewriting of the formalism allows circumvention of the inversion of the restricted one-body density matrix in the calculation of the nth Rényi entanglement entropy for n>2. We test our technique by implementing it in combination with the hybrid Monte Carlo algorithm and calculating the n=2,3,4,⋯,10 Rényi entropies of the one-dimensional attractive Hubbard model. We use that data to extrapolate to the von Neumann (n=1) and n→∞ cases.

Convexity of the entanglement entropy of SU(2N)-symmetric fermions with attractive interactions.

The positivity of the probability measure of attractively interacting systems of 2N-component fermions enables the derivation of an exact convexity property for the ground-state energy of such systems. Using analogous arguments, applied to path-integral expressions for the entanglement entropy derived recently, we prove nonperturbative analytic relations for the Rényi entropies of those systems. These relations are valid for all subsystem sizes, particle numbers, and dimensions, and in arbitrary external trapping potentials.