We examine distinct measures of fermionic entanglement in the exact ground state of a finite superconducting system. It is first shown that global measures such as the one-body entanglement entropy, which represents the minimum relative entropy between the exact ground state and the set of fermionic gaussian states, exhibit a close correlation with the BCS gap, saturating in the strong superconducting regime. The same behavior is displayed by the bipartite entanglement between the set of all single particle states k of positive quasimomenta and their time reversed partnersk. In contrast, the entanglement associated with the reduced density matrix of four single particle modes k,k, k ′ ,k ′ , which can be measured through a properly defined fermionic concurrence, exhibits a different behavior, showing a peak in the vicinity of the superconducting transition for states k, k ′ close to the fermi level and becoming small in the strong coupling regime. In the latter such reduced state exhibits, instead, a finite mutual information and quantum discord. And while the first measures can be correctly estimated with the BCS approximation, the previous four-level concurrence lies strictly beyond the latter, requiring at least a particle number projected BCS treatment for its description. Formal properties of all previous entanglement measures are as well discussed.

We show that one-body entanglement, which is a measure of the deviation of a pure fermionic state from a Slater determinant (SD) and is determined by the mixedness of the single-particle density matrix (SPDM), can be considered as a quantum resource. The associated theory has SDs and their convex hull as free states, and number conserving fermion linear optics operations (FLO), which include one-body unitary transformations and measurements of the occupancy of single-particle modes, as the basic free operations. We first provide a bipartitelike formulation of one-body entanglement, based on a Schmidt-like decomposition of a pure Nfermion state, from which the SPDM [together with the (N − 1)-body density matrix] can be derived. It is then proved that under FLO operations the initial and postmeasurement SPDMs always satisfy a majorization relation, which ensures that these operations cannot increase, on average, the one-body entanglement. It is finally shown that this resource is consistent with a model of fermionic quantum computation which requires correlations beyond antisymmetrization. More general free measurements and the relation with mode entanglement are also discussed.

We examine the fermionic entanglement in the ground state of the fermionic Lipkin model and its relation with bipartite entanglement. It is first shown that the one-body entanglement entropy, which quantifies the minimum distance to a fermionic Gaussian state, behaves similarly to the mean-field order parameter and is essentially proportional to the total bipartite entanglement between the upper and lower modes, a quantity meaningful only in the fermionic realization of the model. We also analyze the entanglement of the reduced state of four single-particle modes (two up-down pairs), showing that its fermionic concurrence is strongly peaked at the phase transition and behaves differently from the corresponding up-down entanglement. We finally show that the first measures and the up-down reduced entanglement can be correctly described through a basic mean-field approach supplemented with symmetry restoration, whereas the concurrence requires at least the inclusion of RPA-type correlations for a proper prediction. Fermionic separability is also discussed.