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-Rényi 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 becomes gapless. We also discuss an exact series expansion of the 2-Rényi entanglement entropy in terms of connected correlation functions of a boundary term. This is obtained by identifying Rényi entropy with ground state fidelity in a doubled and twisted theory.
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-Rényi 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 becomes gapless. We also discuss an exact series expansion of the 2-Rényi entanglement entropy in terms of connected correlation functions of a boundary term. This is obtained by identifying Rényi entropy with ground state fidelity in a doubled and twisted theory.
Entanglement is one of the most intriguing features of quantum theory and a main resource in quantum information science. Ground states of quantum many-body systems with local interactions typically obey an “area law” which means that the entanglement entropy is proportional to the boundary length. It is exceptional when the system is gapless, and the area law had been believed to be violated by at most a logarithm over two decades. Recent discovery of Motzkin and Fredkin spin chain models is striking, since these models provide significant violation of the entanglement beyond the belief, growing as a square root of the volume in spite of local interactions. In this paper, we first analytically compute the Rényi entropy of the Motzkin and Fredkin models by careful treatment of asymptotic analysis. The Rényi entropy is an important quantity, since the whole spectrum of an entangled subsystem is reconstructed once the Rényi entropy is known as a function of its parameter. We find nonanalytic behavior of the Rényi entropy with respect to the parameter, which is a novel phase transition never seen in any other spin chain studied so far. Interestingly, similar behavior is seen in the Rényi entropy of Rokhsar–Kivelson states in two dimensions.
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
Physical interactions in quantum many-body systems are typically local: Individual constituents interact mainly with their few nearest neighbors. This locality of interactions is inherited by a decay of correlation functions, but also reflected by scaling laws of a quite profound quantity: the entanglement entropy of ground states. This entropy of the reduced state of a subregion often merely grows like the boundary area of the subregion, and not like its volume, in sharp contrast with an expected extensive behavior. Such ``area laws'' for the entanglement entropy and related quantities have received considerable attention in recent years. They emerge in several seemingly unrelated fields, in the context of black hole physics, quantum information science, and quantum many-body physics where they have important implications on the numerical simulation of lattice models. In this Colloquium the current status of area laws in these fields is reviewed. Center stage is taken by rigorous results on lattice models in one and higher spatial dimensions. The differences and similarities between bosonic and fermionic models are stressed, area laws are related to the velocity of information propagation in quantum lattice models, and disordered systems, nonequilibrium situations, and topological entanglement entropies are discussed. These questions are considered in classical and quantum systems, in their ground and thermal states, for a variety of correlation measures. A significant proportion is devoted to the clear and quantitative connection between the entanglement content of states and the possibility of their efficient numerical simulation. Matrix-product states, higher-dimensional analogs, and variational sets from entanglement renormalization are also discussed and the paper is concluded by highlighting the implications of area laws on quantifying the effective degrees of freedom that need to be considered in simulations of quantum states.
The area law for entanglement entropy captures a fundamental constraint on the complexity of quantum many-body ground states and enables their efficient description. While the area law is rigorously established in one dimension, its status in higher-dimensional local systems remains unresolved, and it does not hold in general for geometrically non-local systems. Here, we establish a generalized area law for gapped ground states of fully connected Hamiltonians. We show that the bipartite entanglement entropy grows at most logarithmically with system size despite the absence of geometric locality. In the ground state, each site is only weakly entangled with the rest, while configurations with extensive local fluctuations are strongly suppressed, effectively restricting the accessible Hilbert space. As a consequence, the ground state admits a matrix product state approximation with polynomial bond dimension with respect to the system size at fixed accuracy. In the permutation-invariant setting, we further prove a constant entanglement bound and demonstrate that the gapped ground state can be computed in time polylogarithmic in the system size. These results show that low entanglement complexity need not rely on geometric locality, broadening the conceptual and computational scope of area laws.
The Rényi area law conjecture is false below α=1 in high dimensions
Area laws express the expectation that entanglement in gapped quantum ground states scales with a boundary rather than a volume. In one dimension this holds for every Rényi entropy, and the Rényi area-law conjecture asserts the same in higher dimensions for each fixed 0<α<1. Here we disprove this conjecture in every spatial dimension two and higher. We construct finite-range Hamiltonians with fixed local dimension, bounded interaction strength, unique ground states and a uniform spectral gap, whose ground states exhibit volume-law Rényi entanglement while obeying a von Neumann area law and remaining connected to product states through uniformly gapped local paths. The mechanism is error-space complexity: locally identifiable components of arbitrarily small weight can encode states with high entanglement complexity. We also establish the worst-case rank-error trade-off for approximate ground-state projectors, a key tool in one-dimensional area-law proofs. At fixed gap, the optimal Schmidt rank at projection error ε across a planar cut of cross-section A scales as exp[Θ~((Alogε−1)2/3)] when logε−1≳A. Thus α=1 is the sharp threshold for a universal Rényi area law within this adiabatically connected class.
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 hyperscaling violation exponent $\ensuremath{\theta}$. All systems in d spatial dimensions obeying our scaling assumptions and with $\ensuremath{\theta}<d\ensuremath{-}1$ obey the area law, while systems with $\ensuremath{\theta}=d\ensuremath{-}1$ 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 logarithmically these systems must have an unusually large number of low energy states. Finally, we make contact with the recently proposed s-source framework and argue that $\ensuremath{\theta}$ and s are related by $s={2}^{\ensuremath{\theta}}$.