Recently, it has been suggested that operational properties connected to quantum computation can be alternative indicators of quantum phase transitions. In this work we systematically study these operational properties in one-dimensional systems that present phase transitions of different orders. For this purpose, we evaluate the local convertibility between bipartite ground states. Our results suggest that the operational properties, related to nonanalyticities of the entanglement spectrum, are good detectors of explicit symmetries of the model, but not necessarily of phase transitions. We also show that thermodynamically equivalent phases, such as Luttinger liquids, may display different convertibility properties depending on the underlying microscopic model.

• Received 2 December 2013
• Revised 5 June 2014

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevB.89.235132