Rényi entropy of the permutationally invariant part of the ground state across a quantum phase transition

Abstract: We investigate the role of the permutationally invariant part of the density matrix (PIDM) in capturing the properties of the ground state of the system during a quantum phase transition. In the context of quantum state tomography, PIDM is known to be obtainable with only a low number of measurement settings, namely $\mathcal{O}(L^2)$, where $L$ is the system size. Considering the transverse-field Ising chain as an example, we compute the second-order R\'enyi entropy of PIDM for the ground state by using the density matrix renormalization group algorithm. In the ferromagnetic case, the ground state is permutationally invariant both in the limits of zero and infinite field, leading to vanishing R\'enyi entropy of PIDM. The latter exhibits a broad peak as a function of the transverse field around the quantum critical point, which gets more pronounced for larger system size. In the antiferromagnetic case, the peak structure disappears and the R\'enyi entropy diverges like $\mathcal{O}(L)$ in the whole field range of the ordered phase. We discuss the cause of these behaviors of the R\'enyi entropy of PIDM, examining the possible application of this experimentally tractable quantity to the analysis of phase transition phenomena.