Excited-state entanglement and thermal mutual information in random spin chains

Abstract: Entanglement properties of excited eigenstates (or of thermal mixed states) are difficult to study with conventional analytical methods. We approach this problem for random spin chains using a recently developed real-space renormalization group technique for excited states ("RSRG-X"). For the random $XX$ and quantum Ising chains, which have logarithmic divergences in the entanglement entropy of their (infinite-randomness) critical ground states, we show that the entanglement entropy of excited eigenstates retains a logarithmic divergence while the mutual information of thermal mixed states does not. However, in the $XX$ case the coefficient of the logarithmic divergence extends from the universal ground-state value to a universal interval due to the degeneracy of excited eigenstates. These models are noninteracting in the sense of having free-fermion representations, allowing strong numerical checks of our analytical predictions.