corner
corner

Phys. Rev. Lett. 95, 030503 (2005) [4 pages]

Natural Multiparticle Entanglement in a Fermi Gas

Download: PDF (166 kB) Buy this article Export: BibTeX or EndNote (RIS)

Christian Lunkes1,*, Časlav Brukner2,†, and Vlatko Vedral2,3,‡
1QOLS, Blackett Laboratory, Imperial College London, London SW7 2BZ, England, United Kingdom
2Institut für Experimentalphysik, Universität Wien, Boltzmanngasse 5, A-1090 Vienna, Austria
3The School of Physics and Astronomy, University of Leeds, Leeds LS2 9JT, England, United Kingdom

Received 22 February 2005; published 13 July 2005

We investigate multipartite entanglement in a noninteracting fermion gas, as a function of fermion separation, starting from the many particle fermion density matrix. We prove that all multiparticle entanglement can be built only out of two-fermion entanglement. Although from the Pauli exclusion principle we would always expect entanglement to decrease with fermion distance, we surprisingly find the opposite effect for certain fermion configurations. The von Neumann entropy is found to be proportional to the volume for a large number of particles even when they are arbitrarily close to each other. We will illustrate our results using different configurations of two, three, and four fermions at zero temperature although all our results can be applied to any temperature and any number of particles.

© 2005 The American Physical Society

URL:
http://link.aps.org/doi/10.1103/PhysRevLett.95.030503
DOI:
10.1103/PhysRevLett.95.030503
PACS:
03.67.Mn, 03.65.Ud, 05.30.Fk

*Electronic address: christian.lunkes@imperial.ac.uk

Electronic address: caslav.brukner@univie.ac.at

Electronic address: v.vedral@leeds.ac.uk