Phase Space Entanglement Spectrum Vatsal Dwivedi1, Victor Chua2 1Institute for Theoretical Physics, University of Cologne, Z¨ulpicher Straße 77a, 50937 Cologne, Germany 2Department of Physics, University of Basel, Klingelbergstrasse 82, CH-4056 Basel, Switzerland E-mail:
[email protected] Abstract. We generalize the position- and momentum-space entanglement cutsto a family of cuts corresponding to regions in the classical phase space. We explicitly compute the entanglement spectra of free fermionic many-body wavefunctions for a family of phase space entanglement cuts that continuously interpolates between position- and momentum-space cuts. For inversion symmetric wavefunctions, the phase space entanglement spectrum possess a chiral symmetry, to which a topological index can be associated. Keywords: Entanglement, Classical phase space, Noninteracting fermions arXiv:1802.09531v1 [math-ph] 26 Feb 2018 Phase Space Entanglement Spectrum 2 1. Introduction Quantum entanglement is arguably the most intriguing aspect of our current understanding of nature. Besides its implications for the ontology of quantum mechanics, it has also stimulated and enriched a diverse array of fields within theoretical physics[1] such as condensed matter[2, 3, 4], quantum information[5, 6], quantum field theory and string theory[7]. Insights from the study of quantum entanglement have led to the development of many analytical tools for characterization and simulation of extended many-body quantum systems, notable examples being topological entanglement entropy[8] and the density matrix renormalization group (DMRG)[9]. In broad terms, quantum entanglement is the appearance of non-local correlations between local measurements on different parts of a system. Mathematically, this is encoded in the non-purity of the reduced density matrix, which can be quantified using the entanglement spectrum and associated entropies.