Superfluid-Insulator Transition unambiguously detected by entanglement in one-dimensional disordered superfluids

Abstract

We use entanglement to track the superfluid-insulator transition (SIT) in disordered fermionic superfluids described by the one-dimensional Hubbard model. Entanglement is found to have remarkable signatures of the SIT driven by i) the disorder strength V, ii) the concentration of impurities C and iii) the particle density n. Our results reveal the absence of a critical potential intensity on the SIT driven by V, i.e. any small V suffices to decrease considerably the degree of entanglement: it drops similar to 50% for V = -0.25t. We also find that entanglement is non-monotonic with the concentration C, approaching to zero for a certain critical value CC. This critical concentration is found to be related to a special type of localization, here named as fully-localized state, which can be also reached for a particular density n(C). Our results show that the SIT driven by n or C has distinct nature whether it leads to the full localization or to the ordinary one: it is a first-order quantum phase transition only when leading to full localization. In contrast, the SIT driven by V is never a first-order quantum phase transition independently on the type of localization reached.