Distilling momentum-space entanglement in Luttinger liquids at finite temperature

While much is known about the entanglement characteristics of ground states, the properties of reduced thermal density matrices have received significantly less attention. Here we investigate the total correlations in reduced thermal density matrices for momentum-space bipartitioning in Luttinger liquids using analytical and numerical methods. The low-lying part of its spectrum contains an "entanglement gap", which persists up to temperatures comparable to the level spacing. With increasing temperature, the low-energy modes acquire dispersion and resemble those in the physical Hamiltonian with an enhanced effective temperature. The momentum-space entanglement is carried by high-energy modes (compared to temperature), featuring a completely flat spectrum. The von Neumann entropy increases with temperature with a universal Sommerfeld coefficient. The effective Hamiltonian of the right-moving excitations turns out to be as universal as the physical Hamiltonian.