Single-Copy Entanglement in a Gapped Quantum Spin Chain

Abstract

The single-copy entanglement of a given many-body quantum system is defined [J. Eisert and M. Cramer, Phys. Rev. A 72, 042112 (2005)10.1103/PhysRevA.72.042112] as the maximal entanglement deterministically distillable from a bipartition of a single specimen of that system. For critical (gapless) spin chains, it was recently shown that this is exactly half the von Neumann entropy [R. Orús, J. I. Latorre, J. Eisert, and M. Cramer, Phys. Rev. A 73, 060303(R) (2006)], itself defined as the entanglement distillable in the asymptotic limit-i.e., given an infinite number of copies of the system. It is an open question as to what the equivalent behavior for gapped systems is. In this Letter, I show that for the paradigmatic spin-S Affleck-Kennedy-Lieb-Tasaki chain (the archetypal gapped chain), the single-copy entanglement is equal to the von Neumann entropy; i.e., all the entanglement present may be distilled from a single specimen.