  We study the relationship between bipartite entanglement, subsystem particle
number and topology in a half-filled free fermion system. It is proposed that
the spin-projected particle numbers can distinguish the quantum spin Hall state
from other states, and can be used to establish a new topological index for the
system. Furthermore, we apply the new topological invariant to a disordered
system and show that a topological phase transition occurs when the disorder
strength is increased beyond a critical value. It is also shown that the
subsystem particle number fluctuation displays behavior very similar to that of
the entanglement entropy. This provides a lower-bound estimation for the
entanglement entropy, which can be utilized to obtain an estimate of the
entanglement entropy experimentally.
