Fractionalized Excitations Revealed by Entanglement Entropy

Abstract

Fractionalized excitations develop in many unusual many-body states such as quantum spin liquids, disordered phases that cannot be described using any local order parameter. Because these exotic excitations correspond to emergent degrees of freedom, how to probe them and establish their existence is a long-standing challenge. We present a general procedure to reveal the fractionalized excitations using real-space entanglement entropy in critical spin liquids that are particularly relevant to experiments. Moreover, we show how to use the entanglement entropy to construct the corresponding spinon Fermi surface. Our work defines a new pathway to establish and characterize exotic excitations in novel quantum phases of matter.