Entanglement Area Law Research Articles

Locality of edge states and entanglement spectrum from strong subadditivity

We consider two-dimensional states of matter satisfying an uniform area law for entanglement. We show that the topological entanglement entropy is equal to the minimum relative entropy distance from the reduced state to the set of thermal states of local models. The argument is based on strong subadditivity of quantum entropy. For states with zero topological entanglement entropy, in particular, the formula gives locality of the states at the boundary of a region as thermal states of local Hamiltonians. It also implies that the entanglement spectrum of a two-dimensional region is equal to the spectrum of a one-dimensional local thermal state on the boundary of the region.

Generalized transfer matrix states from artificial neural networks

Identifying variational wave functions that efficiently parametrize the physically relevant states in the exponentially large Hilbert space is one of the key tasks towards solving the quantum many-body problem. Powerful tools in this context such as tensor network states have recently been complemented by states derived from artificial neural networks (ANNs). Here, we propose and investigate a new family of quantum states, coined generalized transfer matrix states (GTMS), which bridges between the two mentioned approaches in the framework of deep ANNs. In particular, we show by means of a constructive embedding that the class of GTMS contains generic matrix product states while at the same time being capable of capturing more long-ranged quantum correlations that go beyond the area-law entanglement properties of tensor networks. While the state amplitude of generic deep ANNs cannot be exactly evaluated, that of a GTMS network can be analytically computed using transfer matrix methods. With numerical simulations, we demonstrate how the GTMS network learns random matrix product states in a supervised learning scheme, and how augmenting the network by long-ranged couplings leads to the onset of volume-law entanglement scaling. By means of an explicit example using variational Monte Carlo, we also show that GTMS can parametrize critical quantum many-body ground states to a good accuracy. Our findings suggest that GTMS are a promising candidate for the study of critical and dynamical quantum many-body systems.

Unusual area-law violation in random inhomogeneous systems

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) framework, we show that this exponent is related to the survival probability of certain random walks. The ground state of the model exhibits extended regions of short-range singlets (that we term ‘bubble’ regions) as well as rare long range singlet (‘rainbow’ regions). Crucially, while the probability of extended rainbow regions decays exponentially with their size, that of the bubble regions is power law. We provide strong numerical evidence for the correctness of SDRG results by exploiting the free-fermion solution of the model. Finally, we investigate the role of interactions by considering the random inhomogeneous XXZ spin chain. Within the SDRG framework and in the strong inhomogeneous limit, we show that the above area-law violation takes place only at the free-fermion point of phase diagram. This point divides two extended regions, which exhibit volume-law and area-law entanglement, respectively.

Time evolution of an infinite projected entangled pair state: An algorithm from first principles

A typical quantum state obeying the area law for entanglement on an infinite 2D lattice can be represented by a tensor network ansatz -- known as an infinite projected entangled pair state (iPEPS) -- with a finite bond dimension $D$. Its real/imaginary time evolution can be split into small time steps. An application of a time step generates a new iPEPS with a bond dimension $k$ times the original one. The new iPEPS does not make optimal use of its enlarged bond dimension $kD$, hence in principle it can be represented accurately by a more compact ansatz, favourably with the original $D$. In this work we show how the more compact iPEPS can be optimized variationally to maximize its overlap with the new iPEPS. To compute the overlap we use the corner transfer matrix renormalization group (CTMRG). By simulating sudden quench of the transverse field in the 2D quantum Ising model with the proposed algorithm, we provide a proof of principle that real time evolution can be simulated with iPEPS. A similar proof is provided in the same model for imaginary time evolution of purification of its thermal states.

Entanglement Area Laws for Long-Range Interacting Systems.

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 phase transitions and quantum phase transitions in the presence of long-range interactions.

Effect of SU(2) symmetry on many-body localization and thermalization

The many-body localized (MBL) phase is characterized by a complete set of quasi-local integrals of motion and area-law entanglement of excited eigenstates. We study the effect of non-Abelian continuous symmetries on MBL, considering the case of $SU(2)$ symmetric disordered spin chains. The $SU(2)$ symmetry imposes strong constraints on the entanglement structure of the eigenstates, precluding conventional MBL. We construct a fixed-point Hamiltonian, which realizes a non-ergodic (but non-MBL) phase characterized by eigenstates having logarithmic scaling of entanglement with the system size, as well as an incomplete set of quasi-local integrals of motion. We study the response of such a phase to local symmetric perturbations, finding that even weak perturbations induce multi-spin resonances. We conclude that the non-ergodic phase is generally unstable and that $SU(2)$ symmetry implies thermalization. The approach introduced in this work can be used to study dynamics in disordered systems with non-Abelian symmetries, and provides a starting point for searching non-ergodic phases beyond conventional MBL.

Approximating local observables on projected entangled pair states

Tensor network states are for good reasons believed to capture ground states of gapped local Hamiltonians arising in the condensed matter context, states which are in turn expected to satisfy an entanglement area law. However, the computational hardness of contracting projected entangled pair states in two and higher dimensional systems is often seen as a significant obstacle when devising higher-dimensional variants of the density-matrix renormalisation group method. In this work, we show that for those projected entangled pair states that are expected to provide good approximations of such ground states of local Hamiltonians, one can compute local expectation values in quasi-polynomial time. We therefore provide a complexity-theoretic justification of why state-of-the-art numerical tools work so well in practice. We comment on how the transfer operators of such projected entangled pair states have a gap and discuss notions of local topological quantum order. We finally turn to the computation of local expectation values on quantum computers, providing a meaningful application for a small-scale quantum computer.

Entanglement area law in superfluid 4He

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 theories. Using new exact microscopic numerical simulations of superfluid $^4$He, we demonstrate for the first time an area law scaling of entanglement entropy in a real quantum liquid in three dimensions. We validate the fundamental principles underlying its physical origin, and present an "entanglement equation of state" showing how it depends on the density of the superfluid.

Statistical bubble localization with random interactions

We study one-dimensional spinless fermions with random interactions, but without any on-site disorder. We find that random interactions generically stabilize a many-body localized phase, in spite of the completely extended single-particle degrees of freedom. In the large randomness limit, we construct "bubble-neck" eigenstates having a universal area-law entanglement entropy on average, with the number of volume-law states being exponentially suppressed. We argue that this statistical localization is beyond the phenomenological local-integrals-of-motion description of many-body localization. With exact diagonalization, we confirm the robustness of the many-body localized phase at finite randomness by investigating eigenstate properties such as level statistics, entanglement/participation entropies, and nonergodic quantum dynamics. At weak random interactions, the system develops a thermalization transition when the single-particle hopping becomes dominant.

Finding Matrix Product State Representations of Highly Excited Eigenstates of Many-Body Localized Hamiltonians.

A key property of many-body localized Hamiltonians is the area law entanglement of even highly excited eigenstates. Matrix product states (MPS) can be used to efficiently represent low entanglement (area law) wave functions in one dimension. An important application of MPS is the widely used density matrix renormalization group (DMRG) algorithm for finding ground states of one-dimensional Hamiltonians. Here, we develop two algorithms, the shift-and-invert MPS (SIMPS) and excited state DMRG which find highly excited eigenstates of many-body localized Hamiltonians. Excited state DMRG uses a modified sweeping procedure to identify eigenstates, whereas SIMPS applies the inverse of the shifted Hamiltonian to a MPS multiple times to project out the targeted eigenstate. To demonstrate the power of these methods, we verify the breakdown of the eigenstate thermalization hypothesis in the many-body localized phase of the random field Heisenberg model, show the saturation of entanglement in the many-body localized phase, and generate local excitations.

Holographic duality from random tensor networks

Tensor networks provide a natural framework for exploring holographic duality because they obey entanglement area laws. They have been used to construct explicit toy models realizing many of the interesting structural features of the AdS/CFT correspondence, including the non-uniqueness of bulk operator reconstruction in the boundary theory. In this article, we explore the holographic properties of networks of random tensors. We find that our models naturally incorporate many features that are analogous to those of the AdS/CFT correspondence. When the bond dimension of the tensors is large, we show that the entanglement entropy of all boundary regions, whether connected or not, obey the Ryu-Takayanagi entropy formula, a fact closely related to known properties of the multipartite entanglement of assistance. We also discuss the behavior of Rényi entropies in our models and contrast it with AdS/CFT. Moreover, we find that each boundary region faithfully encodes the physics of the entire bulk entanglement wedge, i.e., the bulk region enclosed by the boundary region and the minimal surface. Our method is to interpret the average over random tensors as the partition function of a classical ferromagnetic Ising model, so that the minimal surfaces of Ryu-Takayanagi appear as domain walls. Upon including the analog of a bulk field, we find that our model reproduces the expected corrections to the Ryu-Takayanagi formula: the bulk minimal surface is displaced and the entropy is augmented by the entanglement of the bulk field. Increasing the entanglement of the bulk field ultimately changes the minimal surface behavior topologically, in a way similar to the effect of creating a black hole. Extrapolating bulk correlation functions to the boundary permits the calculation of the scaling dimensions of boundary operators, which exhibit a large gap between a small number of low-dimension operators and the rest. While we are primarily motivated by the AdS/CFT duality, the main results of the article define a more general form of bulk-boundary correspondence which could be useful for extending holography to other spacetimes.

Many-body-localization transition: strong multifractality spectrum for matrix elements of local operators

For short-ranged disordered quantum models in one dimension, the many-body-localization is analyzed via the adaptation to the many-body context (Serbyn et al 2015 Phys. Rev. X 5 041047) of the Thouless point of view on the Anderson transition: the question is whether a local interaction between two long chains is able to reshuffle completely the eigenstates (delocalized phase with a volume-law entanglement) or whether the hybridization between tensor states remains limited (many-body-localized phase with an area-law entanglement). The central object is thus the level of hybridization induced by the matrix elements of local operators, as compared with the difference of diagonal energies. The multifractal analysis of these matrix elements of local operators is used to analyze the corresponding statistics of resonances. Our main conclusion is that the critical point is characterized by the strong-multifractality spectrum , well known in the context of Anderson localization in spaces of effective infinite dimensionality, where the size of the Hilbert space grows exponentially with the volume. Finally, the possibility of a delocalized non-ergodic phase near criticality is discussed.

Early Breakdown of Area-Law Entanglement at the Many-Body Delocalization Transition.

We introduce the numerical linked cluster expansion as a controlled numerical tool for the study of the many-body localization transition in a disordered system with continuous nonperturbative disorder. Our approach works directly in the thermodynamic limit, in any spatial dimension, and does not rely on any finite size scaling procedure. We study the onset of many-body delocalization through the breakdown of area-law entanglement in a generic many-body eigenstate. By looking for initial signs of an instability of the localized phase, we obtain a value for the critical disorder, which we believe should be a lower bound for the true value, that is higher than current best estimates from finite size studies. This implies that most current methods tend to overestimate the extent of the localized phase due to finite size effects making the localized phase appear stable at small length scales. We also study the mobility edge in these systems as a function of energy density, and we find that our conclusion is the same at all examined energies.

Entanglement area law from specific heat capacity

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 polynomially with temperature, we find a subvolume scaling of entanglement. Our results give experimentally verifiable conditions for area laws, show that they are a generic property of low-energy states of matter, and, to the best of our knowledge, constitute the first proof of an area law for unbounded Hamiltonians beyond those that are integrable.

Area law and its violation: A microscopic inspection into the structure of entanglement and fluctuations

Quantum fluctuations of local quantities can be a direct signature of entanglement in an extended quantum many-body system. Hence they may serve as a theoretical (as well as an experimental) tool to detect the spatial properties of the entanglement entropy of a subsystem. In the ground state of quantum many-body systems, its scaling is typically linear in the boundary of the subsystem (area law). Here we propose a microscopic insight into the spatial structure of entanglement and fluctuations using the concept of \emph{contour}, recently introduced to decompose the bipartite entanglement entropy of lattice free fermions between two extended regions $A$ and $B$ into contributions from single sites in $A$. We generalize the notion of contour to the entanglement of any quadratic (bosonic or fermionic) lattice Hamiltonian, as well as to particle-number fluctuations. The entanglement and fluctuations contours are found to generally decay when moving away from the boundary between $A$ and $B$. We show that in the case of free fermions the decay of the entanglement contour follows closely that of the fluctuation contour. In the case of Bose-condensed interacting bosons, treated via the Bogoliubov and spin-wave approximations, such a link cannot be established -- fluctuation and entanglement contours are found to be radically different, as they lead to a logarithmically violated area law for fluctuations, and to a strict area law of entanglement. Analyzing in depth the role of the zero-energy Goldstone mode of spin-wave theory, and of the corresponding lowest-energy mode in the entanglement spectrum, we unveil a subtle interplay between the special contour and energy scaling of the latter, and universal additive logarithmic corrections to entanglement area law discussed extensively in the recent literature.

Correlations in quantum spin systems from the boundary effect

We introduce the boundary effect on the ground state as an attribute of general local spin systems that restricts the correlations in the ground state. To this end, we introduce what we call a boundary effect function, which characterizes not only the boundary effect, but also the thermodynamic limit of the ground state. We prove various aspects of the boundary effect function to unfold its relationship to other attributes of the system such as a finite spectral gap above the ground state, two-point correlation functions, and entanglement entropies. In particular, it is proven that an exponentially decaying boundary effect function implies the exponential clustering of two-point correlation functions in arbitrary spatial dimension, the entanglement area law in one-dimension, and the logarithmically corrected area law in higher dimension. It is also proven that gapped local spin systems with nondegenerate ground states ordinarily fall into that class. In one-dimension, the area law can also result from a moderately decaying boundary effect function, in which case the system is thermodynamically gapless.

Many-Body Localization Implies that Eigenvectors are Matrix-Product States.

The phenomenon of many-body localization has received a lot of attention recently, both for its implications in condensed-matter physics of allowing systems to be an insulator even at nonzero temperature as well as in the context of the foundations of quantum statistical mechanics, providing examples of systems showing the absence of thermalization following out-of-equilibrium dynamics. In this work, we establish a novel link between dynamical properties--a vanishing group velocity and the absence of transport--with entanglement properties of individual eigenvectors. For systems with a generic spectrum, we prove that strong dynamical localization implies that all of its many-body eigenvectors have clustering correlations. The same is true for parts of the spectrum, thus allowing for the existence of a mobility edge above which transport is possible. In one dimension these results directly imply an entanglement area law; hence, the eigenvectors can be efficiently approximated by matrix-product states.

Many-body localization in periodically driven systems.

We consider disordered many-body systems with periodic time-dependent Hamiltonians in one spatial dimension. By studying the properties of the Floquet eigenstates, we identify two distinct phases: (i)a many-body localized (MBL) phase, in which almost all eigenstates have area-law entanglement entropy, and the eigenstate thermalization hypothesis (ETH) is violated, and (ii)a delocalized phase, in which eigenstates have volume-law entanglement and obey the ETH. The MBL phase exhibits logarithmic in time growth of entanglement entropy when the system is initially prepared in a product state, which distinguishes it from the delocalized phase. We propose an effective model of the MBL phase in terms of an extensive number of emergent local integrals of motion, which naturally explains the spectral and dynamical properties of this phase. Numerical data, obtained by exact diagonalization and time-evolving block decimation methods, suggest a direct transition between the two phases.

Many-body localization edge in the random-field Heisenberg chain

We present a large scale exact diagonalization study of the one dimensional spin $1/2$ Heisenberg model in a random magnetic field. In order to access properties at varying energy densities across the entire spectrum for system sizes up to $L=22$ spins, we use a spectral transformation which can be applied in a massively parallel fashion. Our results allow for an energy-resolved interpretation of the many body localization transition including the existence of an extensive many-body mobility edge. The ergodic phase is well characterized by Gaussian orthogonal ensemble statistics, volume-law entanglement, and a full delocalization in the Hilbert space. Conversely, the localized regime displays Poisson statistics, area-law entanglement and non ergodicity in the Hilbert space where a true localization never occurs. We perform finite size scaling to extract the critical edge and exponent of the localization length divergence.

Entanglement Area Law in Disordered Free Fermion Anderson Model in One, Two, and Three Dimensions

We calculate numerically the entanglement entropy of free fermion ground states in one-, two-, and three-dimensional Anderson models and find that it obeys the area law as long as the linear size of the subsystem is sufficiently larger than the mean free path. This result holds in the metallic phase of the three-dimensional Anderson model, where the mean free path is finite although the localization length is infinite. Relation between the present results and earlier ones on area law violation in special one-dimensional models that support metallic phases is discussed.