Lower entropy bounds and particle number fluctuations in a Fermi sea

Abstract

In this letter we demonstrate, in an elementary manner, that given a partition of the single particle Hilbert space into orthogonal subspaces, a Fermi sea may be factored into pairs of entangled modes, similar to a BCS state. We derive expressions for the entropy and for the particle number fluctuations of a subspace of a Fermi sea, at zero and finite temperatures, and relate these by a lower bound on the entropy. As an application we investigate analytically and numerically these quantities for electrons in the lowest Landau level of a quantum Hall sample.