The modular (or entanglement) Hamiltonian correspondent to the half-space-bipartition of a quantum state uniquely characterizes its entanglement properties. However, in the context of lattice models, its explicit form is analytically known only for the Ising chain and certain free theories in one-dimension. In this work, we provide a throughout investigation of entanglement Hamiltonians in lattice models obtained via the Bisognano-Wichmann theorem, which provides an explicit functional form for the entanglement Hamiltonian itself in quantum field theory. Our study encompasses a variety of one-and two-dimensional models, supporting diverse quantum phases and critical points, and, most importantly, scanning several universality classes, including Ising, Potts, and Luttinger liquids. We carry out extensive numerical simulations based on the density-matrixrenormalization-group method, exact diagonalization, and quantum Monte Carlo. In particular, we compare the exact entanglement properties and correlation functions to those obtained applying the Bisognano-Wichmann theorem on the lattice. We carry out this comparison on both the eigenvalues and eigenvectors of the entanglement Hamiltonian, and expectation values of correlation functions and order parameters. Our results evidence that, as long as the low-energy description of the lattice model is well-captured by a Lorentz-invariant quantum field theory, the Bisognano-Wichmann theorem provides a qualitatively and quantitatively accurate description of the lattice entanglement Hamiltonian. The resulting framework paves the way to direct studies of entanglement properties utilizing well-established statistical mechanics methods and experiments. arXiv:1807.01322v1 [cond-mat.stat-mech] 3 Jul 2018

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Entanglement is known to serve as an order parameter for true topological order in two-dimensional systems. We show how entanglement of disconnected partitions defines topological invariants for one-dimensional topological superconductors. These order parameters quantitatively capture the entanglement that is possible to distill from the ground state manifold, and are thus quantized to 0 or log 2. Their quantization property is inferred from the underlying lattice gauge theory description of topological superconductors, and is corroborated via exact solutions and numerical simulations. Transitions between topologically trivial and non-trivial phases are accompanied by scaling behavior, a hallmark of genuine order parameters, captured by entanglement critical exponents. These order parameters are experimentally measurable utilizing state-of-the-art techniques. Panel b): quadripartite von Neumann entropy S D as a function of µ/t, U/t, at fixed ∆ = 1 and LA = LB = 12. Black lines as from Ref. [22]. The colour plot is obtained via interpolation on a 6 x 8 grid.-that can be distilled from the ground state manifold; (ii) display scaling behavior when approaching quantum phase transitions, and thus allow for the definition of entanglement critical exponents that describe the build-up of non-local quantum correlations across such transitions; (iii) are experimentally measurable in-and out-of-equilibrium utilizing recently introduced [14,15] and demonstrated [25] techniques based on arXiv:1909.04035v1 [cond-mat.supr-con]

We consider a lattice version of the Bisognano-Wichmann (BW) modular Hamiltonian as an ansatz for the bipartite entanglement Hamiltonian of the quantum critical chains. Using numerically unbiased methods, we check the accuracy of the BW-ansatz by both comparing the BW Rényi entropy to the exact results, and by investigating the size scaling of the norm distance between the exact reduced density matrix and the BW one. Our study encompasses a variety of models, scanning different universality classes, including transverse field Ising, Potts and XXZ chains. We show that the Rényi entropies obtained via the BW ansatz properly describe the scaling properties predicted by conformal field theory. Remarkably, the BW Rényi entropies faithfully capture also the corrections to the conformal field theory scaling associated to the energy density operator. In addition, we show that the norm distance between the discretized BW density matrix and the exact one asymptotically goes to zero with the system size: this indicates that the BW-ansatz can be also employed to predict properties of the eigenvectors of the reduced density matrices, and is thus potentially applicable to other entanglement-related quantities such as negativity.