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Large Block Properties of the Entanglement Entropy of Disordered Fermions

We consider a macroscopic disordered system of free $d$-dimensional lattice fermions whose one-body Hamiltonian is a Schrödinger operator $H$ with ergodic potential. We assume that the Fermi energy lies in the exponentially localized part of the spectrum of $H$. We prove that if $S_Λ$ is the entanglement entropy of a lattice cube $Λ$ of side length $L$ of the system, then for any $d \ge 1$ the expectation $\mathbf{ E}\{L^{-(d-1)}S_Λ\}$ has a finite limit as $L \to \infty$ and we identify the limit. Next, we prove that for $d=1$ the entanglement entropy admits a well defined asymptotic form for all typical realizations (with probability 1) as $ L \to \infty$. According to numerical results of [33] the limit is not selfaveraging even for an i.i.d. potential. On the other hand, we show that for $d \ge 2$ and an i.i.d. random potential the variance of $L^{-(d-1)}S_Λ$ decays polynomially as $L \to \infty$, i.e., the entanglement entropy is selfaveraging.