Entanglement in inhomogeneous quantum chains

The basic principle behind this thesis is the improvement of the understanding of phases of matter through the study of quantum entanglement in ground states of inhomogeneous quantum chains. We investigate the physics that results from the interplay of the inhomogeneity with important topics in the theoretical condensed matter field such as defects, phase transitions, and topological phases of matter by proposing different inhomogeneous models. Their characterization must be done in terms of the strength of the inhomogeneity, so we analyze and compare the strong and weak inhomogeneity regimes, which respectively are obtained with real-space RG schemes or with an appropriate continuum limit of the lattice model.

Supervisors: Germán Sierra and Javier Rodríguez Laguna