Exponential Decay of Correlations Implies Area Law

Abstract

We prove that a finite correlation length, i.e., exponential decay of correlations, implies an area law for the entanglement entropy of quantum states defined on a line. The entropy bound is exponential in the correlation length of the state, thus reproducing as a particular case Hastings’s proof of an area law for groundstates of 1D gapped Hamiltonians. As a consequence, we show that 1D quantum states with exponential decay of correlations have an efficient classical approximate description as a matrix product state of polynomial bond dimension, thus giving an equivalence between injective matrix product states and states with a finite correlation length. The result can be seen as a rigorous justification, in one dimension, of the intuition that states with exponential decay of correlations, usually associated with non-critical phases of matter, are simple to describe. It also has implications for quantum computing: it shows that unless a pure state quantum computation involves states with long-range correlations, decaying at most algebraically with the distance, it can be efficiently simulated classically. The proof relies on several previous tools from quantum information theory—including entanglement distillation protocols achieving the hashing bound, properties of single-shot smooth entropies, and the quantum substate theorem—and also on some newly developed ones. In particular we derive a new bound on correlations established by local random measurements, and we give a generalization to the max-entropy of a result of Hastings concerning the saturation of mutual information in multiparticle systems. The proof can also be interpreted as providing a limitation on the phenomenon of data hiding in quantum states.