Entanglement and the Born-Oppenheimer approximation in an exactly solvable quantum many-body system

Abstract

We investigate the correlations between different bipartitions of an exactly solvable one-dimensional many-body Moshinsky model consisting of Nn nuclei and Ne electrons. We study the dependence of entanglement on the inter-particle interaction strength, on the number of particles, and on the particle masses. Consistent with kinematic intuition, the entanglement between two subsystems vanishes when the subsystems have very different masses, while it attains its maximal value for subsystems of comparable mass. We show how this entanglement feature can be inferred by means of the Born-Oppenheimer Ansatz, whose validity and breakdown can be understood from a quantum information point of view.