We consider two-dimensional states of matter satisfying a uniform area law for entanglement. We show that the topological entanglement entropy is equal to the minimum relative entropy distance from the reduced state to the set of thermal states of local models. The argument is based on strong subadditivity of quantum entropy. For states with zero topological entanglement entropy, in particular, the formula gives locality of the states at the boundary of a region as thermal states of local Hamiltonians. It also implies that the entanglement spectrum of a two-dimensional region is equal to the spectrum of a one-dimensional local thermal state on the boundary of the region.
We consider two-dimensional states of matter satisfying a uniform area law for entanglement. We show that the topological entanglement entropy is equal to the minimum relative entropy distance from the reduced state to the set of thermal states of local models. The argument is based on strong subadditivity of quantum entropy. For states with zero topological entanglement entropy, in particular, the formula gives locality of the states at the boundary of a region as thermal states of local Hamiltonians. It also implies that the entanglement spectrum of a two-dimensional region is equal to the spectrum of a one-dimensional local thermal state on the boundary of the region.
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.
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.
Topological entanglement entropy (TEE) represents an intrinsic contribution to the entanglement entropy (EE) in topologically ordered systems. In quantum information theory, strong subadditivity (SSA) is a fundamental property of EE, reflecting the non-negativity of conditional mutual information. TEE was originally believed to be a universal correction to the area law of EE, suggesting that its SSA would directly follow from the SSA of EE. However, due to spurious contributions, the correction term is not universal; consequently, the value predicted by topological quantum field theory (TQFT) provides only a lower bound. In this work, we present a topological analysis showing that the SSA for TEE is equivalent to a specific inequality within the TQFT framework. We further verify that this inequality holds for all known unitary modular tensor categories (UMTCs) up to rank 11, supporting the conjecture that SSA holds universally in the TQFT framework. Conversely, assuming the validity of the SSA condition, the inequality can be interpreted as a consistency criterion for candidate UMTCs.
Entropy is a quantity for counting physical degrees of freedom in a system. At a finite temperature, one can use thermal entropy to study thermodynamical properties. At zero temperature, entanglement entropy is expected to provide a suitable order parameter of a phase structure. Especially, the entanglement entropy exhibits an interesting codimension two area law in a strongly coupled conformal field theory. We compute thermal entropy in a non-relativistic model with an infinite fermion mass limit from an exact effective potential to obtain thermal entropy at an infinite strong coupling limit. The computational result provides vanishing thermal entropy at an infinite strong coupling limit with a finite lattice spacing. The non-trivial topological term can be included in the strongly coupled lattice system to obtain the non-trivial entropy and the topology can be marked from the entropy. We first compute the thermal entropy in a two dimensional lattice topological quantum field theory to study the lattice artifact and also argue that a theory possibly has translational invariance if a system does not have a volume law in the entanglement entropy. Finally, we show that a coefficient of a universal term of the entanglement entropy should not be affected by a choice of an entangling surface in two dimensional conformal field theory for one interval case. We also discuss a choice of the entangling surface in the entanglement entropy in two dimensional CPN−1 model at the large N limit.
Topological ordered phases are gapped states of matter that are characterized by non-local entanglement in their ground state wave functions instead of a local order parameter. In this paper, we review some of the basic results on the entanglement structure of topologically ordered phases. In particular, we focus on the notion and uses of "topological entanglement entropy" in two and higher dimensions, and also briefly review the relation between entanglement spectrum and the spectrum of the physical edge states for chiral topological states. Furthermore, we discuss a curvature expansion for the entanglement entropy which sharpens the nonlocality of topological entanglement entropy.
We construct upper bounds on entanglement entropies of many-body quantum states that have fixed energy expectation values with respect to local Hamiltonians. Our focus is on entanglement entropies of subsystems that make up approximately half of the full system. The upper bound on the von Neumann entanglement entropy is half the sum of the thermal entropies of two fictitious systems at the same temperature as one another, with an additional area-law contribution in some systems. The effective temperature is chosen such that the sum of the thermal energies of the two fictitious systems matches the constraint on the energy of the state in the original problem; at subextensive energies, this temperature decreases with increasing system size. Our upper bounds on Rényi entanglement entropies take an analogous form. These inequalities show that, in systems that are frustration-free (FF) and whose zero-temperature subsystem thermal entropies scale with surface areas (rather than subsystem volumes), ground states are area-law entangled. For physical models of quantum matter, which have well-defined specific heat capacities (and are not necessarily FF), our bounds provide a way to convert this thermodynamic data into constraints on pure-state entanglement at both subextensive and extensive energies. We also show that our general upper bounds on half-system entanglement entropies are optimal, up to subleading corrections, in systems with reflection symmetry and above a subextensive energy threshold. A key application of our results is to constrain the entanglement of quantum states relevant to simulations of zero-temperature response functions, which have energies of order unity. We prove that, in wide varieties of FF systems in two dimensions and higher, the contributions of excitations to von Neumann entanglement entropy are subleading compared with the contribution from the ground state.