The low-temperature physics of quantum many-body systems is largely governed by the structure of their ground states. Minimizing the energy of local interactions, ground states often reflect strong properties of locality such as the area law for entanglement entropy and the exponential decay of correlations between spatially separated observables. In this letter we present a novel characterization of locality in quantum states, which we call `local reversibility'. It characterizes the type of operations that are needed to reverse the action of a general disturbance on the state. We prove that unique ground states of gapped local Hamiltonian are locally reversible. This way, we identify new fundamental features of many-body ground states, which cannot be derived from the aforementioned properties. We use local reversibility to distinguish between states enjoying microscopic and macroscopic quantum phenomena. To demonstrate the potential of our approach, we prove specific properties of ground states, which are relevant both to critical and non-critical theories.
The low-temperature physics of quantum many-body systems is largely governed by the structure of their ground states. Minimizing the energy of local interactions, ground states often reflect strong properties of locality such as the area law for entanglement entropy and the exponential decay of correlations between spatially separated observables. In this letter we present a novel characterization of locality in quantum states, which we call `local reversibility'. It characterizes the type of operations that are needed to reverse the action of a general disturbance on the state. We prove that unique ground states of gapped local Hamiltonian are locally reversible. This way, we identify new fundamental features of many-body ground states, which cannot be derived from the aforementioned properties. We use local reversibility to distinguish between states enjoying microscopic and macroscopic quantum phenomena. To demonstrate the potential of our approach, we prove specific properties of ground states, which are relevant both to critical and non-critical theories.
We study the ground state of a gapped quantum many-body system whose entanglement entropy SA can be expressed as ${S}_{A}=a|\ensuremath{\partial}A|\ensuremath{-}\ensuremath{\gamma}$, where $a,\ensuremath{\gamma}$ are some constants and $|\ensuremath{\partial}A|$ is an area of the subsystem A. By using a recently proved operator extension of strong subadditivity of entropy [I. H. Kim, J. Math. Phys. 53, 122204 (2012)], we show that a certain linear combination of the real-space entanglement spectrum has a small correlation with almost any local operator. Our result implies that there exists a structure relating the real-space entanglement spectrum over different subsystems. Further, this structure is inherited from the generic property of the ground state alone, suggesting that the locality of the entanglement spectrum may be attributed to the area law of entanglement entropy.
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.
Classical simulation of quantum many-body systems is in general a challenging problem for the simple reason that the dimension of the Hilbert space grows exponentially with the system size. In particular, merely encoding a generic quantum many-body state requires an exponential number of bits. However, condensed matter physicists are mostly interested in local Hamiltonians and especially their ground states, which are highly non-generic. Thus, we might hope that at least some physical systems allow efficient classical simulation.Starting with one-dimensional (1D) quantum systems (i.e., the simplest nontrivial case), the first basic question is: Which classes of states have efficient classical representations? It turns out that this question is quantitatively related to the amount of entanglement in the state, for states with ``little entanglement'' are well approximated by matrix product states (a data structure that can be manipulated efficiently on a classical computer). At a technical level, the mathematical notion for ``little entanglement'' is area law, which has been proved for unique ground states in 1D gapped systems. We establish an area law for constant-fold degenerate ground states in 1D gapped systems and thus explain the effectiveness of matrix-product-state methods in (e.g.) symmetry breaking phases. This result might not be intuitively trivial as degenerate ground states in gapped systems can be long-range correlated.Suppose an efficient classical representation exists. How can one find it efficiently? The density matrix renormalization group is the leading numerical method for computing ground states in 1D quantum systems. However, it is a heuristic algorithm and the possibility that it may fail in some cases cannot be completely ruled out. Recently, a provably efficient variant of the density matrix renormalization group has been developed for frustration-free 1D gapped systems. We generalize this algorithm to all (i.e., possibly frustrated) 1D gapped systems. Note that the ground-state energy of 1D gapless Hamiltonians is computationally intractable even in the presence of translational invariance.It is tempting to extend methods and tools in 1D to two and higher dimensions (2+D), e.g., matrix product states are generalized to tensor network states. Since an area law for entanglement (if formulated properly) implies efficient matrix product state representations in 1D, an interesting question is whether a similar implication holds in 2+D. Roughly speaking, we show that an area law for entanglement (in any reasonable formulation) does not always imply efficient tensor network representations of the ground states of 2+D local Hamiltonians even in the presence of translational invariance. It should be emphasized that this result does not contradict with the common sense that in practice quantum states with more entanglement usually require more space to be stored classically; rather, it demonstrates that the relationship between entanglement and efficient classical representations is still far from being well understood.Excited eigenstates participate in the dynamics of quantum systems and are particularly relevant to the phenomenon of many-body localization (absence of transport at finite temperature in strongly correlated systems). We study the entanglement of excited eigenstates in random spin chains and expect that its singularities coincide with dynamical quantum phase transitions. This expectation is confirmed in the disordered quantum Ising chain using both analytical and numerical methods.Finally, we study the problem of generating ground states (possibly with topological order) in 1D gapped systems using quantum circuits. This is an interesting problem both in theory and in practice. It not only characterizes the essential difference between the entanglement patterns that give rise to trivial and nontrivial topological order, but also quantifies the difficulty of preparing quantum states with a quantum computer (in experiments).
We introduce a method for analyzing ground-state properties of quantum many-body systems, based on the characterization of separability and entanglement by single subsystem unitary operations. We apply the method to the study of the ground-state structure of several interacting spin-1/2 models, described by Hamiltonians with different degrees of symmetry. We show that the approach based on single-qubit unitary operations allows us to introduce ``entanglement excitation energies,'' a set of observables that can characterize ground-state properties, including the quantification of single-site entanglement and the determination of quantum critical points. The formalism allows us to identify the existence and location of factorization points, and a purely quantum ``transition of entanglement'' that occurs at the approach of factorization. This kind of quantum transition is characterized by a diverging ratio of excitation energies associated with single-qubit unitary operations.
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 nature of entanglement in many-body systems is a focus of intense research with the observation that entanglement holds interesting information about quantum correlations in large systems and their relation to phase transitions. In particular, it is well known that although generic, many-body states have large, extensive entropy, ground states of reasonable local Hamiltonians carry much smaller entropy, often associated with the boundary length through the so-called area law. Here we introduce a continuous family of frustration-free Hamiltonians with exactly solvable ground states and uncover a remarkable quantum phase transition whereby the entanglement scaling changes from area law into extensively large entropy. This transition shows that entanglement in many-body systems may be enhanced under special circumstances with a potential for generating "useful" entanglement for the purpose of quantum computing and that the full implications of locality and its restrictions on possible ground states may hold further surprises.