Ergotropy and entanglement in critical spin chains
Begoña Mula, Eva M. Fernández, J. E. Alvarellos, J.J. Fernández, David Garcı́a-Aldea, Silvia N. Santalla, Javier Rodríguez-Laguna
Abstract
A subsystem of an entangled ground state (GS) is in a mixed state. Thus, if we isolate this subsystem from its surroundings, we may be able to extract work applying unitary transformations, up to a maximal amount which is called ergotropy. Once this work has been extracted, the subsystem will still contain some bound energy above its local GS, which can provide valuable information about the entanglement structure. We show that the bound energy for half a free fermionic chain decays as the square of the entanglement entropy divided by the chain length, thus approaching zero for large system sizes, and we conjecture that this relation holds for all one-dimensional critical states.