We consider the isotropic or anisotropic XY spin chain in the presence of a transversal random magnetic field, with parameters given by random variables. It is shown that eigenfunction correlator localization of the corresponding effective one-particle Hamiltonian implies a uniform area law bound in expectation for the bipartite entanglement entropy of all eigenstates of the XY chain, i.e., a form of many-body localization at all energies. Here, entanglement with respect to arbitrary connected subchains of the chain can be considered. Applications where the required eigenfunction correlator bounds are known include the isotropic XY chain in random field as well as the anisotropic chain in strong or strongly disordered random field.
@cite_50: We study theoretically and numerically the entanglement entropy of the @math -dimensional free fermions whose one body Hamiltonian is the Anderson model. Using basic facts of the exponential Anderson localization, we show first that the disorder averaged entanglement entropy @math of the @math dimension cube @math of side length @math admits the area law scaling @math even in the gapless case, thereby manifesting the area law in the mean for our model. For @math and @math we obtain then asymptotic bounds for the entanglement entropy of typical realizations of disorder and use them to show that the entanglement entropy is not selfaveraging, i.e., has non vanishing random fluctuations even if @math .
Equipped with these tools we can then complete the proof of the area law ) in . This is accomplished by using an extension of an argument from @cite_50 to reduce the claim to the eigencorrelator localization bound ).