Maximally Entangled Mode, Metal-Insulator Transition and Violation of Entanglement Area Law in Non-interacting Fermion Ground States

We study in this work the ground state entanglement properties of two models of non-interacting fermions moving in one-dimension (1D), that exhibit metal-insulator transitions. We find that entanglement entropy grows either logarithmically or in a power-law fashion in the metallic phase, thus violating the (1D version of) entanglement area law. No such violation is found in the insulating phase. We further find that characteristics of {\em single fermion} states at the Fermi energy (which can {\em not} be obtained from the many-fermion Slater determinant) is captured by the lowest energy single fermion mode of the {\em entanglement} Hamiltonian; this is particularly true at the metal-insulator transition point. Our results suggest entanglement is a powerful way to detect metal-insulator transitions, {\em without} knowledge of the Hamiltonian of the system.

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