Long-distance entanglement in Motzkin and Fredkin spin chains

We derive some entanglement properties of the ground states for two classes of quantum spin chains described by the Fredkin model, for half-integer spins, and the Motzkin model, for integer ones. Since the ground states of the two models are known analytically, we can calculate exactly the entanglement entropy, the negativity and the quantum mutual information. We show, in particular, that these systems exhibit long-distance entanglement, namely two disjoint regions of the chains remain entangled even when their separation is sent to infinity, i.e. these systems are not affected by decoherence. This strongly entangled behavior, occurring both for colorful versions of the models (with spin larger than 1/2 or 1, respectively) and for colorless ones (with spin 1/2 and 1), is consistent with the violation of the cluster decomposition property. Finally, we show that this behavior involves disjoint segments located both at the edges and in the bulk of the chains.