Worldline deconfinement and emergent long-range interaction in entanglement Hamiltonian and entanglement spectrum

Abstract: When a system exhibits a bulk gap but gapless edge states (e.g., a symmetry-protected topological phase), the entanglement spectrum (ES) resembles the energy spectrum on virtual edge, that is the Li-Haldane conjecture. In this way, the ES plays an important probe to detect the topological phases according to this bulk-edge correspondence. When a system is fully gapped, both in bulk and edge, the ES still remains similar to the virtual edge spectrum which can be explained by the recently proposed wormhole effect in the path integral of reduced density matrix. However, what will happen in the ES when the system is fully gapless? We find that though the ES roughly seems like an edge energy spectrum, and it actually contains relevant long-range interaction which modifies the intrinsic physics of entanglement Hamiltonian (EH). Moreover, the mechanism of short-/long-range interaction in EH can be understood as the confinement/deconfinement of worldlines in a path integral of reduced density matrix. Our work demonstrates that the gapless mode can induce a long-range interaction in EH.