New insights into the entanglement of disjoint blocks

Maurizio Fagotti

Published 2011-10-17, updated 2011-11-21Version 2

We study the entanglement of two disjoint blocks in spin-1/2 chains obtained by merging solvable models, such as XX and quantum Ising models. We focus on the universal quantities that can be extracted from the R\'enyi entropies S_\alpha. The most important information is encoded in some functions denoted by F_\alpha. We compute F_2 and we show that F_\alpha-1 and F_{v.N.}, corresponding to the von Neumann entropy, can be negative, in contrast to what observed in all models examined so far. An exact relation between the entanglement of disjoint subsystems in the XX model and that in a chain embodying two quantum Ising models is a by-product of our investigations.