Ground-state and thermal entanglements in non-Hermitian XY system with real and imaginary magnetic fields

In this manuscript, we study the non-Hermitian spin-1/2 XY model in the presence of the alternating, imaginary and transverse magnetic fields. For the two-site spin system, we solve exactly the energy spectrum and phase diagram and also calculate the ground-state and thermal entanglements by using the concept of the concurrence. It is found that the two-site concurrence in the eigenstate which only depends on the imaginary magnetic field \(\eta \) is always equal to one in the region of \(\mathcal{P}\mathcal{T}\) symmetry, while it decreases with \(\eta \) in the \(\mathcal{P}\mathcal{T}\)-symmetric broken region; especially, the first derivative of concurrence shows the non-analytic behavior at the exceptional point, and the same is true in the case of the biorthogonal basis, which indicates that the concurrence can characterize the phase transition in this non-Hermitian system. The interesting thing is that \(\eta \) weakens the thermal entanglement when the system is isotropic and enhances the entanglement when the system belongs to the Ising universality class. For the one-dimensional spin chain, the magnetization and entanglement are further studied by using the two-spin cluster mean-field approximation. The results show that their variations have opposite trends with the magnetic fields. Moreover, the system exists the first-order quantum phase transitions for some anisotropic parameters in the \(\mathcal{P}\mathcal{T}\)-symmetry region, and the entanglement changes suddenly at the quantum phase transition point.