We prove that the entanglement entropy of the ground state of a locally gapped frustration-free 2D lattice spin system satisfies an area law with respect to a vertical bipartition of the lattice into left and right regions. We first establish that the ground state projector of any locally gapped frustration-free 1D spin system can be approximated to within error $ε$ by a degree $O(\sqrt{n\log(ε^{-1})})$ multivariate polynomial in the interaction terms of the Hamiltonian. This generalizes the optimal bound on the approximate degree of the boolean AND function, which corresponds to the special case of commuting Hamiltonian terms. For 2D spin systems we then construct an approximate ground state projector (AGSP) that employs the optimal 1D approximation in the vicinity of the boundary of the bipartition of interest. This AGSP has sufficiently low entanglement and error to establish the area law using a known technique.
We identify a large class of quantum many-body systems that can be solved exactly: natural frustration-free spin-1/2 nearest-neighbor Hamiltonians on arbitrary lattices. We show that the entire ground state manifold of such models can be found exactly by a tensor network of isometries acting on a space locally isomorphic to the symmetric subspace. Thus, for this wide class of models real-space renormalization can be made exact. Our findings also imply that every such frustration-free spin model satisfies an area law for the entanglement entropy of the ground state, establishing a novel large c…
Let $H$ be a frustration-free Hamiltonian describing a 2D grid of qudits with local interactions, a unique ground state, and local spectral gap lower bounded by a positive constant. For any bipartition defined by a vertical cut of length $L$ running from top to bottom of the grid, we prove that the corresponding entanglement entropy of the ground state of $H$ is upper bounded by $\tilde{O}(L^{5/3})$. For the special case of a 1D chain, our result provides a new area law which improves upon prior work, in terms of the scaling with qudit dimension and spectral gap. In addition, for any bipartiti…
We present a new proof for the 1D area law for frustration-free systems with a constant gap, which exponentially improves the entropy bound in Hastings' 1D area law, and which is tight to within a polynomial factor. For particles of dimension $d$, spectral gap $ε>0$ and interaction strength of at most $J$, our entropy bound is $S_{1D}\le \orderof{1}X^3\log^8 X$ where $X\EqDef(J\log d)/ε$. Our proof is completely combinatorial, combining the detectability lemma with basic tools from approximation theory. Incorporating locality into the proof when applied to the 2D case gives an entanglement bou…
We study frustrated quantum systems from a quantum information perspective. Within this approach, we find that highly frustrated systems do not follow any general ''area law'' of block entanglement, while weakly frustrated ones have area laws similar to those of nonfrustrated systems away from criticality. To calculate the block entanglement in systems with degenerate ground states, typical in frustrated systems, we define a ''cooling'' procedure of the ground state manifold, and propose a frustration degree and a method to quantify constructive and destructive interference effects of entangle…
At the core of every frustrated system, one can identify the existence of frustrated rings that are usually interpreted in terms of single--particle physics. We check this point of view through a careful analysis of the entanglement entropy of both models that admit an exact single--particle decomposition of their Hilbert space due to integrability and those for which the latter is supposed to hold only as a low energy approximation. In particular, we study generic spin chains made by an odd number of sites with short-range antiferromagnetic interactions and periodic boundary conditions, thus …
Geometrical frustration, power law tunneling and non-local gauge fields from scattered light
ICFO - Institut de Ciències Fotòniques, The Barcelona Institute of Science and Technology（ICFO - 光子科学研究院，巴塞罗那科学技术研究所）；Institute for Condensed Matter Physics and Complex Systems, DISAT, Politecnico di Torino（都灵理工大学DISAT凝聚态物理与复杂系统研究所）；ICREA（加泰罗尼亚高级研究局）
We prove stability of the spectral gap for gapped, frustration-free Hamiltonians under general, quasi-local perturbations. We present a necessary and sufficient condition for stability, which we call "Local Topological Quantum Order" and show that this condition implies an area law for the entanglement entropy of the groundstate subspace. This result extends previous work by Bravyi et al., on the stability of topological quantum order for Hamiltonians composed of commuting projections with a common zero-energy subspace. We conclude with a list of open problems relevant to spectral gaps and top…
The University of Tokyo（东京大学）；Institute for Solid State Physics, University of Tokyo（东京大学固体物理研究所）；Hong Kong University of Science and Technology（香港科技大学）；RIKEN Center for Interdisciplinary Theoretical and Mathematical Sciences (iTHEMS), RIKEN（理化学研究所跨学科理论与数学科学中心（iTHEMS））
A key notion in heavy-fermion systems is the entanglement between conduction electrons and localized spin degrees of freedom. To study these systems from this point of view, we compute the mutual information in a ferromagnetic and antiferromagnetic Kondo lattice model in the presence of geometrical frustration. Here the interplay between the Kondo effect, the Ruderman-Kittel-Kasuya-Yosida interaction, and geometrical frustration leads to partial Kondo screened, conventional Kondo insulating, and antiferromagnetic phases. In each of these states the mutual information follows an area law, the c…
We improve Knabe's spectral gap bound for frustration-free translation-invariant local Hamiltonians in 1D. The bound is based on a relationship between global and local gaps. The global gap is the spectral gap of a size-$m$ chain with periodic boundary conditions, while the local gap is that of a subchain of size $n<m$ with open boundary conditions. Knabe proved that if the local gap is larger than the threshold value $1/(n-1)$ for some $n>2$, then the global gap is lower bounded by a positive constant in the thermodynamic limit $m\rightarrow \infty$. Here we improve the threshold to $\frac{6}…
Recent results on the stability of the spectral gap under general perturbations for frustration-free Hamiltonians, have motivated the following question: Does the entanglement entropy of quantum states that are connected to states satisfying an area law along gapped Hamiltonian paths, also satisfy an area law? We answer this question in the affirmative, combining recent advances in quasi-adiabatic evolution and Lieb-Robinson bounds with ideas from the proof of the 1D area law.
We show that ground states of unfrustrated quantum spin-1/2 systems on general lattices satisfy an entanglement area law, provided that the Hamiltonian can be decomposed into nearest-neighbor interaction terms which have entangled excited states. The ground state manifold can be efficiently described as the image of a low-dimensional subspace of low Schmidt measure, under an efficiently contractible tree-tensor network. This structure gives rise to the possibility of efficiently simulating the complete ground space (which is in general degenerate). We briefly discuss "non-generic" cases, inclu…
Area law violations for entanglement entropy in the form of a square root has recently been studied for one-dimensional frustration-free quantum systems based on the Motzkin walks and their variations. Here we consider a Motzkin walk with a different Hilbert space on each step of the walk spanned by elements of a {\it Symmetric Inverse Semigroup} with the direction of each step governed by its algebraic structure. This change alters the number of paths allowed in the Motzkin walk and introduces a ground state degeneracy sensitive to boundary perturbations. We study the frustration-free spin ch…
We propose to construct a family of states of one-dimensional spin chains by replacing the finite dimensional matrices in matrix product states by infinite dimensional operators constructed from bosonic annihilation and creation operators. The resulting states are demonstrated to violate the area law and to exhibit long range correlations. In addition, we propose an efficient way to prepare the states experimentally, in which the spins interact sequentially with an ancilla system.
We prove an area law with a logarithmic correction for the mutual information for fixed points of local dissipative quantum system satisfying a rapid mixing condition, under either of the following assumptions: the fixed point is pure, or the system is frustration free.
We demonstrate an area law bound on the ground state entanglement entropy of a wide class of gapless quantum states of matter using a strategy called local entanglement thermodynamics. The bound depends only on thermodynamic data, actually a single exponent, the hyper-scaling violation exponent $θ$. All systems in $d$ spatial dimensions obeying our scaling assumptions and with $θ< d-1$ obey the area law, while systems with $θ= d-1$ can violate the area law at most logarithmically. We also discuss the case of frustration-free Hamiltonians and show that to violate the area law more than logarith…
An area law is proved for the Renyi entanglement entropy of possibly degenerate ground states in one-dimensional gapped quantum systems. Suppose in a chain of $n$ spins the ground states of a local Hamiltonian with energy gap $ε$ are constant-fold degenerate. Then, the Renyi entanglement entropy $R_α(0<α<1)$ of any ground state across any cut is upper bounded by $\tilde O(α^{-3}/ε)$, and any ground state can be well approximated by a matrix product state of subpolynomial bond dimension $2^{\tilde O(ε^{-1/4}\log^{3/4}n)}$.
Atypical eigenstates in the form of quantum scars and fragmentation of Hilbert space due to conservation laws provide obstructions to thermalization in the absence of disorder. In certain models with dipole and $U(1)$ conservation, the fragmentation results in subdiffusive transport. In this paper we study the interplay between scarring and weak fragmentation giving rise to anomalous hydrodynamics in a class of one-dimensional spin-$1$ frustration-free projector Hamiltonians, known as deformed Motzkin chain. The ground states and low-lying excitations of these chains exhibit large entanglement…
We show that the two-dimensional (2D) local Hamiltonian problem with the constraint that the ground state obeys area laws is QMA-complete. We also prove similar results in 2D translation-invariant systems and for the 3D Heisenberg and Hubbard models with local magnetic fields. Consequently, unless MA = QMA, not all ground states of 2D local Hamiltonians with area laws have efficient classical representations that support efficient computation of local expectation values. In the future, even if area laws are proved for ground states of 2D gapped systems, the computational complexity of these sy…
It is commonly believed that area laws for entanglement entropies imply that a quantum many-body state can be faithfully represented by efficient tensor network states - a conjecture frequently stated in the context of numerical simulations and analytical considerations. In this work, we show that this is in general not the case, except in one dimension. We prove that the set of quantum many-body states that satisfy an area law for all Renyi entropies contains a subspace of exponential dimension. Establishing a novel link between quantum many-body theory and the theory of communication complex…
We consider random translation-invariant frustration-free quantum spin Hamiltonians on $\mathbb Z^D$ in which the nearest-neighbor interaction in every direction is randomly sampled and then distributed across the lattice. Our main result is that, under a small rank constraint, the Hamiltonians are automatically frustration-free and they are gapped with a positive probability. This extends previous results on 1D spin chains to all dimensions. The argument additionally controls the local gap. As an application, we obtain a 2D area law for a cut-dependent ground state via recent AGSP methods of …
A study of the artificial neural network representation of quantum many-body states is presented. The locality and entanglement properties of states for shallow and deep quantum neural networks are investigated in detail. By introducing the notion of local quasi-product states, for which the locally connected shallow feed-forward neural network states and restricted Boltzmann machine states are special cases, we show that Rényi entanglement entropies of all these states obey the entanglement area law. Besides, we also investigate the entanglement features of deep Boltzmann machine states and s…
It is often observed in the ground state of spatially-extended quantum systems with local interactions that the entropy of a large region is proportional to its surface area. In some cases, this area law is corrected with a logarithmic factor. This contrasts with the fact that in almost all states of the Hilbert space, the entropy of a region is proportional to its volume. This paper shows that low-energy states have (at most) an area law with the logarithmic correction, provided two conditions hold: (i) the state has sufficient decay of correlations, (ii) the number of eigenstates with vanish…
We study the entanglement distillability properties of thermal states of many-body systems. Following the ideas presented in [D.Cavalcanti et al., arxiv:0705.3762], we first discuss the appearance of bound entanglement in those systems satisfying an entanglement area law. Then, we extend these results to other topologies, not necessarily satisfying an entanglement area law. We also study whether bound entanglement survives in the macroscopic limit of an infinite number of particles.
Entanglement entropy is typically proportional to area, but sometimes it acquires an additional logarithmic pre-factor. We offer some intuitive explanations for these facts.
The area law conjecture states that the entanglement entropy of a region of space in the ground state of a gapped, local Hamiltonian only grows like the surface area of the region. We show that, for any quantum state that fulfills an area law, the reduced quantum state of a region of space can be unitarily compressed into a thickened surface of the region. If the interior of the region is lost after this compression, the full quantum state can be recovered to high precision by a quantum channel only acting on the thickened surface. The thickness of the boundary scales inversely proportional to…
We prove an area law for the entanglement entropy in gapped one dimensional quantum systems. The bound on the entropy grows surprisingly rapidly with the correlation length; we discuss this in terms of properties of quantum expanders and present a conjecture on completely positive maps which may provide an alternate way of arriving at an area law. We also show that, for gapped, local systems, the bound on Von Neumann entropy implies a bound on Rényi entropy for sufficiently large $α<1$ and implies the ability to approximate the ground state by a matrix product state.
We prove that the entanglement entropy of any state evolved under an arbitrary $1/r^α$ long-range-interacting D-dimensional lattice spin Hamiltonian cannot change faster than a rate proportional to the boundary area for any $α>D+1$. We also prove that for any $α>2D+2$, the ground state of such a Hamiltonian satisfies the entanglement area law if it can be transformed along a gapped adiabatic path into a ground state known to satisfy the area law. These results significantly generalize their existing counterparts for short-range interacting systems, and are useful for identifying dynamical phas…
We prove an upper bound on the maximal rate at which a Hamiltonian interaction can generate entanglement in a bipartite system. The scaling of this bound as a function of the subsystem dimension on which the Hamiltonian acts nontrivially is optimal and is exponentially improved over previously known bounds. As an application, we show that a gapped quantum many-body spin system on an arbitrary lattice satisfies an area law for the entanglement entropy if and only if any other state with which it is adiabatically connected (i.e. any state in the same phase) also satisfies an area law.
Entanglement entropy in free scalar field theory at its ground state is dominated by an area law term. However, when mixed states are considered this property ceases to exist. We show that in such cases the mutual information obeys an "area law". The proportionality constant connecting the area to the mutual information has an interesting dependence on the temperature. At infinite temperature it tends to a finite value which coincides with the classical calculation.
Area laws for entanglement in quantum many-body systems give useful information about their low-temperature behaviour and are tightly connected to the possibility of good numerical simulations. An intuition from quantum many-body physics suggests that an area law should hold whenever there is exponential decay of correlations in the system, a property found, for instance, in non-critical phases of matter. However, the existence of quantum data-hiding state--that is, states having very small correlations, yet a volume scaling of entanglement--was believed to be a serious obstruction to such an …
Ground states of local Hamiltonians are known to obey the entanglement entropy area law. While area law violation of a mild kind (logarithmic) is commonly encountered, strong area-law violation (more than logarithmic) is rare. In this paper, we study the long range quantum spin glass in one dimension whose couplings are disordered and fall off with distance as a power-law. We show that this system exhibits more than logarithmic area law violation in its ground state. Strikingly this feature is found to be true even in the short range regime in sharp contrast to the spinless long range disorder…
Area laws are a far-reaching consequence of the locality of physical interactions, and they are relevant in a range of systems, from black holes to quantum many-body systems. Typically, these laws concern the entanglement entropy or the quantum mutual information of a subsystem at a single time. However, when considering information propagating in spacetime, while carried by a physical system with local interactions, it is intuitive to expect area laws to hold for spacetime regions; in this work, we prove such a law in the case of quantum lattice systems. We consider a sequence of local quantu…
Area laws were first discovered by Bekenstein and Hawking, who found that the entropy of a black hole grows proportional to its surface area, and not its volume. Entropy area laws have since become a fundamental part of modern physics, from the holographic principle in quantum gravity to ground state wavefunctions of quantum matter, where entanglement entropy is generically found to obey area law scaling. As no experiments are currently capable of directly probing the entanglement area law in naturally occurring many-body systems, evidence of its existence is based on studies of simplified the…
We propose a method for measuring the string tension in gauge theories, by considering an interference effect of mesons, which is governed by a space-time area law, due to confinement. Although it is only a gedanken experiment for real elementary particles, in the context of quantum simulations of confining gauge theories such an experiment can be realized.
We introduce a technique for applying quantum expanders in a distributed fashion, and use it to solve two basic questions: testing whether a bipartite quantum state shared by two parties is the maximally entangled state and disproving a generalized area law. In the process these two questions which appear completely unrelated turn out to be two sides of the same coin. Strikingly in both cases a constant amount of resources are used to verify a global property.
We numerically investigate the link between the delocalization-localization transition and entanglement in a disordered long-range hopping model of spinless fermions by studying various static and dynamical quantities. This includes the inverse participation ratio, level-statistics, entanglement entropy and number fluctuations in the subsystem along with quench and wave-packet dynamics. Finite systems show delocalized, quasi-localized and localized phases. The delocalized phase shows strong area-law violation whereas the (quasi)localized phase adheres to (for large subsystems) the strict area …
Open quantum systems interact with their environment and their dynamical behaviour depends strongly both on the spectral properties of the environment and the structure of the interaction between the physical system and the environment. We examine the consequences of these spectral and structural properties on simple but general systems in the case of deterministic (non stochastic) interactions of arbitrary strength. The central point of interest concerns the role played by the semi-group property of the interaction in its relation with entropy and area laws properties of the system of interes…
We consider general locally-interacting arbitrary-dimensional lattice spin systems that are gapped for any system size. We show under reasonable conditions that nondegenerate ground states of such systems obey the entanglement area law. In so doing, we offer an intuitive picture on how a spectral gap restricts the correlations that a ground state can accommodate and leads to such a special feature.
Does bound entanglement naturally appear in quantum many-body systems? We address this question by showing the existence of bound-entangled thermal states for harmonic oscillator systems consisting of an arbitrary number of particles. By explicit calculations of the negativity for different partitions, we find a range of temperatures for which no entanglement can be distilled by means of local operations, despite the system being globally entangled. We offer an interpretation of this result in terms of entanglement-area laws, typical of these systems. Finally, we discuss generalizations of thi…
The discovery of novel entanglement patterns in quantum many-body systems is a prominent research direction in contemporary physics. Here we provide the example of a spin chain with random and inhomogeneous couplings that in the ground state exhibits a very unusual area law violation. In the clean limit, i.e., without disorder, the model is the rainbow chain and has volume law entanglement. We show that, in the presence of disorder, the entanglement entropy exhibits a power-law growth with the subsystem size, with an exponent 1/2. By employing the Strong Disorder Renormalization Group (SDRG) f…
We prove a conjecture by Bravyi on an upper bound on entanglement rates of local Hamiltonians. We then use this bound to prove the stability of the area law for the entanglement entropy of quantum spin systems under adiabatic and quasi-adiabatic evolutions.
We review a number of ideas related to area law scaling of the geometric entropy from the point of view of condensed matter, quantum field theory and quantum information. An explicit computation in arbitrary dimensions of the geometric entropy of the ground state of a discretized scalar free field theory shows the expected area law result. In this case, area law scaling is a manifestation of a deeper reordering of the vacuum produced by majorization relations. Furthermore, the explicit control on all the eigenvalues of the reduced density matrix allows for a verification of entropy loss along …
We study the scaling of entanglement in low-energy states of quantum many-body models on lattices of arbitrary dimensions. We allow for unbounded Hamiltonians such that systems with bosonic degrees of freedom are included. We show that if at low enough temperatures the specific heat capacity of the model decays exponentially with inverse temperature, the entanglement in every low-energy state satisfies an area law (with a logarithmic correction). This behaviour of the heat capacity is typically observed in gapped systems. Assuming merely that the low-temperature specific heat decays polynomial…
We investigate the scaling of the entanglement entropy in an infinite translational invariant Fermionic system of any spatial dimension. The states under consideration are ground states and excitations of tight-binding Hamiltonians with arbitrary interactions. We show that the entropy of a finite region typically scales with the area of the surface times a logarithmic correction. Thus, in contrast to analogous Bosonic systems, the entropic area law is violated for Fermions. The relation between the entanglement entropy and the structure of the Fermi surface is discussed, and it is proven, that…
Generic quantum states in the Hilbert space of a many body system are nearly maximally entangled whereas low energy physical states are not; the so-called area laws for quantum entanglement are widespread. In this paper we introduce the novel concept of entanglement susceptibility by expanding the 2-Renyi entropy in the boundary couplings. We show how this concept leads to the emergence of area laws for bi-partite quantum entanglement in systems ruled by local gapped Hamiltonians. Entanglement susceptibility also captures quantitatively which violations one should expect when the system become…
We prove an upper bound proportional to the surface area for the bipartite entanglement of the ground state and thermal states of harmonic oscillator systems with disorder, as measured by the logarithmic negativity. Our assumptions are satisfied for some standard models that are almost surely gapless in the thermodynamic limit.
We study theoretically and numerically the entanglement entropy of the $d$-dimensional free fermions whose one body Hamiltonian is the Anderson model. Using basic facts of the exponential Anderson localization, we show first that the disorder averaged entanglement entropy $\langle S_Λ\rangle$ of the $d$ dimension cube $Λ$ of side length $l$ admits the area law scaling $\langle S_Λ\rangle \sim l^{(d-1)}, \ l \gg 1$ even in the gapless case, thereby manifesting the area law in the mean for our model. For $d=1$ and $l\gg 1$ we obtain then asymptotic bounds for the entanglement entropy of typical …
We examine the evaluation of entanglement measures in weakly correlated gaussian states. It is shown that they can be expressed in terms of the singular values of a particular block of the generalized contraction matrix. This result enables to obtain in a simple way asymptotic expressions and related area laws for the entanglement entropy of bipartitions in pure states, as well as for the logarithmic negativity associated with bipartitions and also pairs of arbitrary subsystems. As illustration, we consider different types of contiguous and noncontiguous blocks in two dimensional lattices. Exa…
