The size of controllable quantum systems has grown in recent times. Therefore, the spatial degree of freedom becomes more and more important in experimental quantum systems. However, the investigation of entanglement in many-body systems mainly concentrated on the number of entangled particles and ignored the spatial degree of freedom so far. As a consequence, a general concept together with experimentally realizable criteria has been missing to describe the spatial distribution of entanglement. We close this gap by introducing the concept of entanglement width as measure of the spatial distribution of entanglement in many-body systems. We develop criteria to detect the width of entanglement based solely on global observables. As a result, our entanglement criteria can be applied easily to many-body systems since single-particle addressing is not necessary.
The size of controllable quantum systems has grown in recent times. Therefore, the spatial degree of freedom becomes more and more important in experimental quantum systems. However, the investigation of entanglement in many-body systems mainly concentrated on the number of entangled particles and ignored the spatial degree of freedom so far. As a consequence, a general concept together with experimentally realizable criteria has been missing to describe the spatial distribution of entanglement. We close this gap by introducing the concept of entanglement width as measure of the spatial distribution of entanglement in many-body systems. We develop criteria to detect the width of entanglement based solely on global observables. As a result, our entanglement criteria can be applied easily to many-body systems since single-particle addressing is not necessary.
We review methods that allow one to detect and characterize quantum correlations in many-body systems, with a special focus on approaches which are scalable. Namely, those applicable to systems with many degrees of freedom, without requiring a number of measurements or computational resources to analyze the data that scale exponentially with the system size. We begin with introducing the concepts of quantum entanglement, Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen steering, and Bell nonlocality in the bipartite scenario, to then present their multipartite generalization. We review recent progress on characterizing these quantum correlations from partial information on the system state, such as through data-driven methods or witnesses based on low-order moments of collective observables. We then review state-of-the-art experiments that demonstrate the preparation, manipulation and detection of highly-entangled many-body systems. For each platform (e.g. atoms, ions, photons, superconducting circuits) we illustrate the available toolbox for state preparation and measurement, emphasizing the challenges that each system poses. To conclude, we present a list of timely open problems in the field.
We show how entanglement may be quantified in spin and cold atom many-body systems using standard experimental techniques only. The scheme requires no assumptions on the state in the laboratory, and a lower bound to the entanglement can be read off directly from the scattering cross section of neutrons deflected from solid state samples or the time-of-flight distribution of cold atoms in optical lattices, respectively. This removes a major obstacle which so far has prevented the direct and quantitative experimental study of genuine quantum correlations in many-body systems: The need for a full characterization of the state to quantify the entanglement contained in it. Instead, the scheme presented here relies solely on global measurements that are routinely performed and is versatile enough to accommodate systems and measurements different from the ones we exemplify in this work.
This paper addresses the following main question: Do we have a theoretical understanding of entanglement applicable to a full variety of physical settings? It is clear that not only the assumption of distinguishability, but also the few-subsystem scenario, are too narrow to embrace all possible physical settings. In particular, the need to go beyond the traditional subsystem-based framework becomes manifest when one tries to apply the conventional concept of entanglement to the physics of matter, since the constituents of a quantum many-body system are indistinguishable particles. We shall discuss here a notion of generalized entanglement, which can be applied to any operator language (fermions, bosons, spins, etc.) used to describe a physical system and which includes the conventional entanglement settings introduced to date in a unified fashion. This is realized by noticing that entanglement is an observer-dependent concept, whose properties are determined by the expectations of a distinguished set of observables without reference to a preferred subsystem decomposition, i.e., it depends on the physically relevant point of view. This viewpoint depends in turn upon the relationship between different sets of observables that determine our ability to control the system of interest. Indeed, the extent to which entanglement is present depends on the observables used to measure a system and describe its states. This represents a most conspicuous advantage as will be highlighted by the condensed-matter application we will discuss.
One of the greatest challenges in the fields of quantum information processing and quantum technologies is the detailed coherent control over each and every constituent of quantum systems with an ever increasing number of particles. Within this endeavor, harnessing of many-body entanglement against the detrimental effects of the environment is a major pressing issue. Besides being an important concept from a fundamental standpoint, entanglement has been recognized as a crucial resource for quantum speed-ups or performance enhancements over classical methods. Understanding and controlling many-body entanglement in open systems may have strong implications in quantum computing, quantum simulations of many-body systems, secure quantum communication or cryptography, quantum metrology, our understanding of the quantum-to-classical transition, and other important questions of quantum foundations. In this paper we present an overview of recent theoretical and experimental efforts to underpin the dynamics of entanglement under the influence of noise. Entanglement is thus taken as a dynamic quantity on its own, and we survey how it evolves due to the unavoidable interaction of the entangled system with its surroundings. We analyze several scenarios, corresponding to different families of states and environments, which render a very rich diversity of dynamical behaviors. In contrast to single-particle quantities, like populations and coherences, which typically vanish only asymptotically in time, entanglement may disappear at a finite time. In addition, important classes of entanglement display an exponential decay with the number of particles when subject to local noise, which poses yet another threat to the already-challenging scaling of quantum technologies. Other classes, however, turn out to be extremely robust against local noise. Theoretical results and recent experiments regarding the difference between local and global decoherence are summarized. Control and robustness- enhancement techniques, scaling laws, statistical and geometrical aspects of multipartite-entanglement decay are also reviewed; all in order to give a broad picture of entanglement dynamics in open quantum systems addressed to both theorists and experimentalists inside and outside the field of quantum information.
One of the greatest challenges in the fields of quantum information processing and quantum technologies is the detailed coherent control over each and every constituent of quantum systems with an ever increasing number of particles. Within this endeavor, harnessing of many-body entanglement against the detrimental effects of the environment is a major pressing issue. Besides being an important concept from a fundamental standpoint, entanglement has been recognized as a crucial resource for quantum speed-ups or performance enhancements over classical methods. Understanding and controlling many-body entanglement in open systems may have strong implications in quantum computing, quantum simulations of many-body systems, secure quantum communication or cryptography, quantum metrology, our understanding of the quantum-to-classical transition, and other important questions of quantum foundations.In this paper we present an overview of recent theoretical and experimental efforts to underpin the dynamics of entanglement under the influence of noise. Entanglement is thus taken as a dynamic quantity on its own, and we survey how it evolves due to the unavoidable interaction of the entangled system with its surroundings. We analyze several scenarios, corresponding to different families of states and environments, which render a very rich diversity of dynamical behaviors.In contrast to single-particle quantities, like populations and coherences, which typically vanish only asymptotically in time, entanglement may disappear at a finite time. In addition, important classes of entanglement display an exponential decay with the number of particles when subject to local noise, which poses yet another threat to the already-challenging scaling of quantum technologies. Other classes, however, turn out to be extremely robust against local noise. Theoretical results and recent experiments regarding the difference between local and global decoherence are summarized. Control and robustness-enhancement techniques, scaling laws, statistical and geometrical aspects of multipartite-entanglement decay are also reviewed; all in order to give a broad picture of entanglement dynamics in open quantum systems addressed to both theorists and experimentalists inside and outside the field of quantum information.
Entanglement detection is essential in quantum information science and quantum many-body physics. It has been proved that entanglement exists almost surely for a random quantum state, while the realizations of effective entanglement criteria usually consume exponentially many resources with regard to system size or qubit number, and efficient criteria often perform poorly without prior knowledge. This fact implies a fundamental limitation might exist in the detectability of entanglement. In this work, we formalize this limitation as a fundamental trade-off between the efficiency and effectiveness of entanglement criteria via a systematic method to evaluate the detection capability of entanglement criteria theoretically. For a system coupled to an environment, we prove that any entanglement criterion needs exponentially many observables to detect the entanglement effectively when restricted to single-copy operations. Otherwise, the detection capability of the criterion will decay double exponentially. Furthermore, if multicopy joint measurements are allowed, the effectiveness of entanglement detection can be exponentially improved, which implies a quantum advantage in entanglement detection problems. Our results may shed light on why quantum phenomena are difficult to observe in large noisy systems.