Entanglement entropy of two disjoint intervals and spin structures in interacting chains in and out of equilibrium

Abstract

We take the paradigm of interacting spin chains, the Heisenberg spin-$$ \frac{1}{2} $$ 1 2 XXZ model, as a reference system and consider interacting models that are related to it by Jordan-Wigner transformations and restrictions to sub-chains. An example is the fermionic analogue of the gapless XXZ Hamiltonian, which, in a continuum scaling limit, is described by the massless Thirring model. We work out the Rényi-α entropies of disjoint blocks in the ground state and extract the universal scaling functions describing the Rényi-α tripartite information in the limit of infinite lengths. We consider also the von Neumann entropy, but only in the limit of large distance. We show how to use the entropies of spin blocks to unveil the spin structures of the underlying massless Thirring model. Finally, we speculate about the tripartite information after global quenches and conjecture its asymptotic behaviour in the limit of infinite time and small quench. The resulting conjecture for the “residual tripartite information”, which corresponds to the limit in which the intervals’ lengths are infinitely larger than their (large) distance, supports the claim of universality recently made studying noninteracting spin chains. Our mild assumptions imply that the residual tripartite information after a small quench of the anisotropy in the gapless phase of XXZ is equal to − log 2.