Detection of a Rényi Index Dependent Transition in Entanglement Entropy Scaling

Abstract: The scaling of entanglement with subsystem size encodes key information about phases and criticality, but the von Neumann entropy is costly to access in experiments and simulations, often requiring full state tomography. The second Rényi entropy is readily measured using two-copy protocols and is often used as a proxy for the von Neumann entanglement entropy, where it is assumed to track its asymptotic scaling. However, Sugino and Korepiny (Int. J. Mod. Phys. B 32, 1850306 (2018)) revealed that in the ground state of some spin models, the scaling of the von Neumann and second Rényi entropies varies from power law to logarithmic scaling as a function of the Rényi index. By constructing a number-conserving many-body state with only two local degrees of freedom, we obtain a Rényi-index-dependent change in the leading entanglement scaling: the second Rényi entropy remains logarithmic while the von Neumann entropy is parametrically larger. We then introduce a symmetry-aware lower bound on the von Neumann entropy built from charge-resolved second Rényi entropies and the subsystem charge distribution. Comparing this bound to the total second Rényi entropy provides a practical diagnostic for anomalous entanglement scaling from experimentally accessible data.