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arXiv:1511.04369 · Physical Review Letters

Entanglement of Distillation for Lattice Gauge Theories

Karel Van Acoleyen, Nick Bultinck, Jutho Haegeman, Michael Mariën, Volkher B. Scholz, Frank Verstraete

Published Sep 21, 2016• 71 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

We study the entanglement structure of lattice gauge theories from the local operational point of view, and, similar to Soni and Trivedi [J. High Energy Phys. 1 (2016) 1], we show that the usual entanglement entropy for a spatial bipartition can be written as the sum of an undistillable gauge part and of another part corresponding to the local operations and classical communication distillable entanglement, which is obtained by depolarizing the local superselection sectors. We demonstrate that the distillable entanglement is zero for pure Abelian gauge theories at zero gauge coupling, while it is in general nonzero for the non-Abelian case. We also consider gauge theories with matter, and show in a perturbative approach how area laws-including a topological correction-emerge for the distillable entanglement. Finally, we also discuss the entanglement entropy of gauge fixed states and show that it has no relation to the physical distillable entropy.

DOI
10.1103/physrevlett.117.131602

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We study the entanglement structure of lattice gauge theories from the local operational point of view, and, similar to Soni and Trivedi [J. High Energy Phys. 1 (2016) 1], we show that the usual entanglement entropy for a spatial bipartition can be written as the sum of an undistillable gauge part and of another part corresponding to the local operations and classical communication distillable entanglement, which is obtained by depolarizing the local superselection sectors. We demonstrate that the distillable entanglement is zero for pure Abelian gauge theories at zero gauge coupling, while it is in general nonzero for the non-Abelian case. We also consider gauge theories with matter, and show in a perturbative approach how area laws-including a topological correction-emerge for the distillable entanglement. Finally, we also discuss the entanglement entropy of gauge fixed states and show that it has no relation to the physical distillable entropy.
We propose a definition for the entanglement entropy of a gauge theory on a spatial lattice. Our definition applies to any subset of links in the lattice, and is valid for both Abelian and Non-Abelian gauge theories. For ZN {\mathbb{Z}}_N ZN​ and U(1) theories, without matter, our definition agrees with a particular case of the definition given by Casini, Huerta and Rosabal. We also argue that in general, both for Abelian and Non-Abelian theories, our definition agrees with the entanglement entropy calculated using a definition of the replica trick. Our definition, however, does not agree with some standard ways to measure entanglement, like the number of Bell pairs which can be produced by entanglement distillation.
A definition for the entanglement entropy in a gauge theory was given recently in arXiv:1501.02593. Working on a spatial lattice, it involves embedding the physical state in an extended Hilbert space obtained by taking the tensor product of the Hilbert space of states on each link of the lattice. This extended Hilbert space admits a tensor product decomposition by definition and allows a density matrix and entanglement entropy for the set of links of interest to be defined. Here, we continue the study of this extended Hilbert space definition with particular emphasis on the case of Non-Abelian gauge theories. We extend the electric centre definition of Casini, Huerta and Rosabal to the Non-Abelian case and find that it differs in an important term. We also find that the entanglement entropy does not agree with the maximum number of Bell pairs that can be extracted by the processes of entanglement distillation or dilution, and give protocols which achieve the maximum bound. Finally, we compute the topological entanglement entropy which follows from the extended Hilbert space definition and show that it correctly reproduces the total quantum dimension in a class of Toric code models based on Non-Abelian discrete groups.
Abstract We compute the topological entanglement entropy for a large set of lattice models in d-dimensions. It is well known that many such quantum systems can be constructed out of lattice gauge models. For dimensionality higher than two, there are generalizations going beyond gauge theories, which are called higher gauge theories and rely on higher-order generalizations of groups. Our main concern is a large class of d-dimensional quantum systems derived from Abelian higher gauge theories. In this paper, we derive a general formula for the bipartition entanglement entropy for this class of models, and from it we extract both the area law and the sub-leading terms, which explicitly depend on the topology of the entangling surface. We show that the entanglement entropy SA in a sub-region A is proportional to log (GSDA~) \left({GSD}_{\tilde{A}}\right) (GSDA~​) GSD A ˜ , where GSDA~ {GSD}_{\tilde{A}} GSDA~​ GSD A ˜ is the ground state degeneracy of a particular restriction of the full model to A. The quantity GSDA~ {GSD}_{\tilde{A}} GSDA~​ GSD A ˜ can be further divided into a contribution that scales with the size of the boundary ∂A and a term which depends on the topology of ∂A. There is also a topological contribution coming from A itself, that may be non-zero when A has a non-trivial homology. We present some examples and discuss how the topology of A affects the topological entropy. Our formalism allows us to do most of the calculation for arbitrary dimension d. The result is in agreement with entanglement calculations for known topological models.
Entanglement entropy in SU(2)SU(2)SU(2) lattice gauge theory using a dual loop formulation
One must exercise care in calculating entanglement entropy of gauge theories, because the local Gauss' laws prevent a tensor-product decomposition of the Hilbert space into spatial regions. In this work, we study entanglement entropy in lattice SU(2)SU(2)SU(2) gauge theory using the loop formulation together with the Casini-Huerta-Rosabal (henceforth, abbreviated as CHR) algebraic entropy approach. The loop formulations involve a set of canonical transformations that trade the Kogut-Susskind link variables and the local Gauss' laws for the physical loop variables and a single global Gauss' law. Within this framework, we reformulate the CHR entropy directly in the physical Hilbert space. We identify the regional algebras and the center, which, in the loop formulation, is not generated by boundary-localized operators, but instead reduces to a global Casimir of the regional algebra. This structure reveals that the area law of entanglement entropy cannot be determined solely from the gauge constraints. The gauge constraints decompose the reduced density matrix into superselection sectors, and the locality of correlations in the physical states gives rise to the area law. Thus, the analysis separates the algebraic structure dictated by Gauss' constraints from the geometric origin of the area law.
We focus on the issue of proper definition of entanglement entropy in lattice gauge theories, and examine a naive definition where gauge invariant states are viewed as elements of an extended Hilbert space which contains gauge non-invariant states as well. Working in the extended Hilbert space, we can define entanglement entropy associated with an arbitrary subset of links, not only for abelian but also for non-abelian theories. We then derive the associated replica formula. We also discuss the issue of gauge invariance of the entanglement entropy. In the Z N gauge theories in arbitrary space dimensions, we show that all the standard properties of the entanglement entropy, e.g. the strong subadditivity, hold in our definition. We study the entanglement entropy for special states, including the topological states for the Z N gauge theories in arbitrary dimensions. We discuss relations of our definition to other proposals.
Lattice gauge theories (LGT) play a central role in modern physics, providing insights into high-energy physics, condensed matter physics, and quantum computation. Due to the nontrivial structure of the Hilbert space of LGT systems, entanglement in such systems is tricky to define. However, when one limits themselves to superselection-resolved entanglement, that is, entanglement corresponding to specific gauge symmetry sectors (commonly denoted as superselection sectors), this problem disappears, and the entanglement becomes well-defined. The study of superselection-resolved entanglement is interesting in LGT for an additional reason: when the gauge symmetry is strictly obeyed, superselection-resolved entanglement becomes the only distillable contribution to the entanglement. In our work, we study the behavior of superselection-resolved entanglement in LGT systems. We employ a tensor network construction for gauge-invariant systems as defined by Zohar and Burrello (2016) and find that, in a vast range of cases, the leading term in superselection-resolved entanglement depends on the number of corners in the partition, that is, corner-law entanglement. To our knowledge, this is the first case of such a corner-law being observed in any lattice system.