We provide a summary of both seminal and recent results on typical entanglement. By ‘typical’ values of entanglement, we refer here to values of entanglement quantifiers that (given a reasonable measure on the manifold of states) appear with arbitrarily high probability for quantum systems of sufficiently high dimensionality. We shall focus on pure states and work within the Haar measure framework for discrete quantum variables, where we report on results concerning the average von Neumann and linear entropies as well as arguments implying the typicality of such values in the asymptotic limit. We then proceed to discuss the generation of typical quantum states with random circuitry. Different phases of entanglement, and the connection between typical entanglement and thermodynamics are discussed. We also cover approaches to measures on the non-compact set of Gaussian states of continuous variable quantum systems.
We discuss a method based on sampling minimally entangled typical thermal states (METTS) that can simulate finite temperature quantum systems with a computational cost comparable to ground state DMRG. Detailed implementations of each step of the method are presented, along with efficient algorithms for working with matrix product states and matrix product operators. We furthermore explore how properties of METTS can reveal characteristic order and excitations of systems and discuss why METTS form an efficient basis for sampling. Finally, we explore the extent to which the average entanglement of a METTS ensemble is minimal.
In a seminal paper [Phys. Rev. Lett. 71, 1291 (1993)], Page conjectured that the entanglement entropy of typical pure states is
Styp≃lnDA−(1/2)DA2/D, where
DA and
D are the Hilbert space dimensions of the subsystem and the system, respectively, and typicality is with respect to the Haar measure. Typical pure states are hence (nearly) maximally entangled. We prove that
S1+=lnDA−[1/(2ln2)](lnDA)2/lnD is an upper bound for the average entanglement entropy of all many-body fermionic eigenstates of a class of translationally invariant quadratic Hamiltonians in one dimension, and that the variance vanishes with increasing system size. Consequently, whenever the size of the subsystem is not a vanishing fraction of the size of the system, typical eigenstates of such Hamiltonians have a volume-law entanglement but do not become maximally entangled as
D→∞, i.e., they are qualitatively different from typical pure states. We also prove that, in the limit in which the subsystem size is a vanishing fraction of the system size, the average entanglement entropy is maximal.