Signatures of metal-insulator and topological phase transitions in the entanglement of one-dimensional disordered fermions (1403.6129v1)

Abstract: We study one-dimensional disordered fermions that either undergo metal-insulator transitions or topological phase transitions to become trivial Anderson insulators. We focus on using entanglement to elucidate how the spatial, momentum, and internal degrees of freedom of fermions are affected by the presence of disorder in such cases. We develop entanglement tools that reveal the existence of metallic states in the presence of disorder and further show clear signatures of the corresponding localization transition even in the presence of interactions. In systems where the internal degrees of freedom are coupled with the motion of the electrons, topological phases develop. We subject a topological insulator model to different types of disorder and discuss how the topological aspects of the system can be captured through entanglement, even at strong disorder.