Quantum impurities exhibit fascinating many-body phenomena when the small interacting impurity changes the physics of a large noninteracting environment. The characterisation of such strongly correlated non-perturbative effects is particularly challenging due to the infinite size of the environment, and the inability of local correlators to capture the build-up of long-ranged entanglement in the system. Here, we harness an entanglement-based observable - the purity of the impurity - as a witness for the formation of strong correlations. We showcase the utility of our scheme by exactly solving the open Kondo box model in the small box limit, and thus describe all-electronic dot-cavity devices. Specifically, we conclusively characterise the metal-to-insulator phase transition in the system and identify how the (conducting) dot-lead Kondo singlet is quenched by an (insulating) intra-impurity singlet formation. Furthermore, we propose an experimentally feasible tomography protocol for the measurement of the purity, which motivates the observation of impurity physics through their entanglement build-up.
We investigate the Aharonov-Bohm (AB) interference pattern in the electron transmission through a mesoscopic ring in which two identical non-interacting magnetic impurities are embedded. Adopting a quantum waveguide theory, we derive the exact transmission probability amplitudes and study the influence of maximally entangled states of the impurity spins on the electron transmittivity interference pattern. For suitable electron wave vectors, we show that the amplitude of AB oscillations in the absence of impurities is in fact not reduced within a wide range of the electron-impurity coupling con…
We study the entanglement of magnetic impurities in an environment of electrons through successive scattering while an external magnetic field is applied. We show that the dynamics of the problem can be approximately described by a reduced model of three interacting spins, which reveals an intuitive view on how spins can be entangled by controlled electron scattering. The role of the magnetic field is rather crucial. Depending on the initial state configuration, the magnetic field can either increase or decrease the resulting entanglement but more importantly it can allow the impurities to be …
We present a detailed analysis of the electronic and optical properties of two-electron quantum dots with a two-dimensional Gaussian confinement potential. We study the effects of Coulomb impurities and the possibility of manipulate the entanglement of the electrons by controlling the confinement potential parameters. The degree of entanglement becomes highly modulated by both the location and charge screening of the impurity atom, resulting two regimes: one of low entanglement and other of high entanglement, with both of them mainly determined by the magnitude of the charge. It is shown that …
We consider a system consisting of single electrons moving along a 1D wire in the presence of two magnetic impurities. Such system shows strong analogies with a Fabry - Perot interferometer in which the impurities play the role of two mirrors with a quantum degree of freedom: the spin. We have analysed the electron transmittivity of the wire in the presence of entanglement between the impurity spins. The main result of our analysis is that, for suitable values of the electron momentum, there are two maximally entangled state of the impurity spins the first of which makes the wire transparent w…
We study a quantum phase transition which occurs in a system composed of two impurities (or quantum dots) each coupled to a different interacting (Luttinger-liquid) lead. While the impurities are coupled electrostatically, there is no tunneling between them. Using a mapping of this system onto a Kondo model, we show analytically that the system undergoes a Berezinskii-Kosterlitz-Thouless quantum phase transition as function of the Luttinger liquid parameter in the leads and the dot-lead interaction. The phase with low values of the Luttinger-liquid parameter is characterized by an abrupt switc…
In order to quantify quantum entanglement in two impurity Kondo systems, we calculate the concurrence, negativity, and von Neumann entropy. The entanglement of the two Kondo impurities is shown to be determined by two competing many-body effects, the Kondo effect and the Ruderman-Kittel-Kasuya-Yosida (RKKY) interaction, $I$. Due to the spin-rotational invariance of the ground state, the concurrence and negativity are uniquely determined by the spin-spin correlation between the impurities. It is found that there exists a critical minimum value of the antiferromagnetic correlation between the im…
We use ultrafast optical pulses and coherent techniques to create spin entangled states of non-interacting electrons bound to donors (at least three) and at least two Mn2+ ions in a CdTe quantum well. Our method, relying on the exchange interaction between localized excitons and paramagnetic impurities, can in principle be applied to entangle a large number of spins.
In a recent paper -- F. Ciccarello \emph{et al.}, New J. Phys. \textbf{8}, 214 (2006) -- we have demonstrated that the electron transmission properties of a one-dimensional (1D) wire with two identical embedded spin-1/2 impurities can be significantly affected by entanglement between the spins of the scattering centers. Such effect is of particular interest in the control of transmission of quantum information in nanostructures and can be used as a detection scheme of maximally entangled states of two localized spins. In this letter, we relax the constraint that the two magnetic impurities are…
We show how canonical transformations can map problems with impurities coupled to non-interacting rings onto a similar problem with open boundary conditions. The consequent reduction of entanglement, and the fact the density matrix renormalization group (DMRG) is optimally suited for open boundary conditions, increases the efficiency of the method exponentially, making it an unprecedented tool to study persistent currents. We demonstrate its application to the case of the one-channel and two-channel Kondo problems, finding interesting connections between the two.
We present a model where two magnetic impurities in a discrete tight-binding ring become entangled because of scattering processes associated to the injection of a conduction electron. We introduce a weak coupling approximation that allows us to solve the problem in a analytical way and compare the theory with the exact numerical results. We obtain the generation of entanglement both in a deterministic way and in a probabilistic one. The first case is intrinsically related to the structure of the two-impurity reduced density matrix, while the second one occurs when a projection on the electron…
Entanglement, which quantifies non-local correlations in quantum mechanics, is the fascinating concept behind much of aspiration towards quantum technologies. Nevertheless, directly measuring the entanglement of a many-particle system is very challenging. Here we show that via supervised machine learning using a convolutional neural network, we can infer the entanglement from a measurable observable for a disordered interacting quantum many-particle system. Several structures of neural networks were tested and a convolutional neural network akin to structures used for image and speech recognit…
We analyze the scattering sector of the Hamiltonians for both gapless and gapped graphene in the presence of a charge impurity using the 2D Dirac equation, which is applicable in the long wavelength limit. We show that for certain range of the system parameters, the combined effect of the short range interactions due to the charge impurity can be modelled using a single real parameter appearing in the boundary conditions. The phase shifts and the scattering matrix depend explicitly on this parameter. We argue that this parameter for graphene can be fixed empirically, through measurements of ob…
It is a common knowledge that an effective interaction of a quantum impurity with an electromagnetic field can be screened by surrounding charge carriers, whether mobile or static. Here we demonstrate that very strong, `anomalous' screening can take place in the presence of a neutral, weakly-polarizable environment, due to an exchange of orbital angular momentum between the impurity and the bath. Furthermore, we show that it is possible to generalize all phenomena related to isolated impurities in an external field to the case when a many-body environment is present, by casting the problem in …
Combining ab initio calculations and effective models derived from them, we discuss the electronic structure of oxygen doped gold chains when one Au atom is replaced by any transition-metal atom of the $3d$ series. The effect of O doping is to bring extended Au $5d_{xz}$ and $5d_{yz}$ states to the Fermi level, which together with the Au states of zero angular momentum projection, lead to three possible channels for the screening of the magnetism of the impurity. For most 3d impurities the expected physics is similar to that of the underscreened Kondo model, with singular Fermi liquid behavior…
We present practical methods to measure entanglement for quantum simulators that can be realized with trapped ions, cold atoms, and superconducting qubits. Focussing on long- and short-range Ising-type Hamiltonians, we introduce schemes that are applicable under realistic experimental conditions including mixedness due to, e.g., noise or temperature. In particular, we identify a single observable whose expectation value serves as a lower bound to entanglement and which may be obtained by a simple quantum circuit. As such circuits are not (yet) available for every platform, we investigate the p…
