How universal is the entanglement spectrum?

Anushya Chandran, Vedika Khemani, Shivaji Lal Sondhi

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64 Scopus citations


It is now commonly believed that the ground state entanglement spectrum (ES) exhibits universal features characteristic of a given phase. In this Letter, we show that this belief is false in general. Most significantly, we show that the entanglement Hamiltonian can undergo quantum phase transitions in which its ground state and low-energy spectrum exhibit singular changes, even when the physical system remains in the same phase. For broken symmetry problems, this implies that the low-energy ES and the Rényi entropies can mislead entirely, while for quantum Hall systems, the ES has much less universal content than assumed to date.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Article number060501
JournalPhysical review letters
Issue number6
StatePublished - Aug 4 2014

All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes

  • Physics and Astronomy(all)


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