Quantum Geometry and Entanglement in Two-dimensional Insulators: A View from the Corner Charge Fluctuation

Measuring bipartite fluctuations of a conserved charge, such as the particle number, within a finite region is a powerful approach to characterizing quantum systems. When the measured region has sharp corners, the bipartite fluctuation receives an additional contribution known to exhibit universal angle-dependence in 2D isotropic and uniform systems. Here we establish that the corner charge fluctuation reveals universal information even for generic lattice systems of non-interacting electrons. We first prove that universal angle-dependence can be recovered in the small-angle limit for proper partitions of the lattice, from which the integrated Fubini-Study quantum metric can be extracted. A model of a compact obstructed atomic insulator is introduced to illustrate this effect analytically. Numerical verification is presented for various Chern insulator models, demonstrating the experimental relevance of the corner charge fluctuation in a finite-size quantum simulator as a probe of quantum geometry. Last but not least, we highlight a remarkable connection between quantum geometry and quantum information through the lens of corner entanglement entropies.