Supersymmetric spin chains with nonmonotonic dispersion relation: Criticality and entanglement entropy.

ABSTRACT

We study the critical behavior and the ground-state entanglement of a large class of su(1|1) supersymmetric spin chains with a general (not necessarily monotonic) dispersion relation. We show that this class includes several relevant models, with both short- and long-range interactions of a simple form. We determine the low temperature behavior of the free energy per spin, and deduce that the models considered have a critical phase in the same universality class as a (1+1)-dimensional conformal field theory (CFT) with central charge equal to the number of connected components of the Fermi sea. We also study the Rényi entanglement entropy of the ground state, deriving its asymptotic behavior as the block size tends to infinity. In particular, we show that this entropy exhibits the logarithmic growth characteristic of (1+1)-dimensional CFTs and one-dimensional (fermionic) critical lattice models, with a central charge consistent with the low-temperature behavior of the free energy. Our results confirm the widely believed conjecture that the critical behavior of fermionic lattice models is completely determined by the topology of their Fermi surface.