A scaling function for the particle entanglement entropy of fermions

Abstract

Entanglement entropy under a particle bipartition generates complementary information to mode entanglement because it is sensitive to interactions and particle statistics at leading order and does not depend on any externally imposed length scale. In this paper, we investigate the particle entanglement entropy in a system of N interacting spinless lattice fermions in one spatial dimension by combining bosonization techniques with exact and approximate numerical methods. We introduce a general scaling form for the fermionic particle entanglement entropy captured by a shape function that enters as an extensive interaction-induced correction to a known free fermion result. A general asymptotic expansion in the total number of particles demonstrates that its form is robust for different values of the Rényi index and highlights how quantum correlations are encoded in the n-particle density matrix of a pure many-body quantum state.