Many-body entanglement in fermion systems

Abstract

We discuss a general bipartitelike representation and Schmidt decomposition of an arbitrary pure state of N indistinguishable fermions, based on states of M < N and ( N − M ) fermions. It is directly connected with the reduced M - and ( N − M ) -body density matrices (DMs), which have the same spectrum in such states. The concept of M -body entanglement emerges naturally in this scenario, generalizing that of one-body entanglement. Rigorous majorization relations satisfied by the normalized M -body DM are then derived, which imply that the associated entropy will not increase, on average, under a class of operations which have these DMs as postmeasurement states. Moreover, such entropy is an upper bound to the bipartite entanglement entropy generated by a class of operations which map the original state to a bipartite state of M and N − M effectively distinguishable fermions. Analytic evaluation of the spectrum of M -body DMs in some strongly correlated fermionic states is also provided.