Global and short-range entanglement properties in excited, many-body localized spin chains*

We explore the use of short-range entanglement measures, such as concurrence and negativity, and global entanglement measures such as geometric entanglement, as indicators of many-body localization (MBL) in the spectra of disordered spin systems. From the perspective of entanglement monogamy, the two types of entanglement behave oppositely in the thermalized and MBL phases. In a recent work, the concurrence of subsystems, a measure of local entanglement, was used in a study of many-body localization in a one-dimensional spin-1/2 system (Bera and Lakshminarayan, 2016). We show numerically that the negativity displays notably similar behavior for this system, with the advantage that it can also be extended to systems of higher local dimension. We then demonstrate this extension in practice by using it to predict the existence of an MBL phase in a disordered a spin-1 system. In terms of global entanglement, the geometric entanglement of both spin-1/2 and spin-1 systems is also shown to behave as a complementary indicator of the MBL phenomenon.