Entanglement entropy of two-species hard-core bosons in one dimension

Abstract: We study the von Neumann entropy of a model for two-species hard-core bosons in one dimension. In this model, the same-species bosons satisfy hard-core conditions, while the different-species bosons are allowed to occupy the same site with a local interaction U . At half-filling, by Jordan-Wigner transformation, the model is exactly mapped to a fermionic Hubbard model. The phase transition from superfluid U = 0 to Mott insulator U > 0 can be explained by simple one-band theory at half-filling. We measure the von Neumann entanglement entropy of the ground states for the half-filled case and away from half-filling to understand quantum phase transitions. To achieve this goal, we use a time-evolution-block decimation method with infinite-size matrix product state and also use a density matrix renormalization group with matrix product operators with large bond dimensions up to 300. We found strong evidence that the local minimum point of the von Neumann entanglement entropy is the quantum critical point for finite-bond-dimension matrix product states.