Quasiparticle entanglement: redefinition of the vacuum and reduced density matrix approach

Abstract

A scattering approach to entanglement in mesoscopic conductors with independent fermionic quasiparticles is discussed. We focus on conductors in the tunneling limit, where a redefinition of the quasiparticle vacuum transforms the wavefunction from a manybody product state of noninteracting particles to a state describing entangled two-particle excitations out of the new vacuum. The approach is illustrated with two examples (i) a normal-superconducting system, where the transformation is made between Bogoliubov-de Gennes quasiparticles and Cooper pairs, and (ii) a normal system, where the transformation is made between electron quasiparticles and electron-hole pairs. This is compared to a scheme where an effective two-particle state is derived from the manybody scattering state by a reduced density matrix approach.

Submitted to New Journal of Physics, Focused Issue on "Solid State Quantum Information". 19 pages, 7 figures