Universality in the full counting statistics of trapped fermions

We study the distribution of particle number in extended subsystems of a one-dimensional non-interacting Fermi gas confined in a potential well at zero temperature. Universal features are identified in the scaled bulk and edge regions of the trapped gas where the full counting statistics are given by the corresponding limits of the eigenvalue statistics in Gaussian unitary random matrix ensembles. The universal limiting behavior is confirmed by the bulk and edge scaling of the particle number fluctuations and the entanglement entropy.