Entanglement is the fundamental difference between classical and quantum systems and has become one of the guiding principles in the exploration of high-and low-energy physics.The calculation of entanglement entropies in interacting quantum field theories, however, remains challenging.Here, we present the first method for the explicit computation of reduced density matrices of interacting quantum field theories using truncated Hamiltonian methods.The method is based on constructing an isomorphism between the Hilbert space of the full system and the tensor product of Hilbert spaces of subintervals.This naturally enables the computation of the von Neumann and arbitrary Rényi entanglement entropies as well as mutual information, logarithmic negativity, and other measures of entanglement.Our method is applicable to equilibrium states and nonequilibrium evolution in real time.It is model independent and can be applied to any Hamiltonian truncation method that uses a free basis expansion.We benchmark the method on the free Klein-Gordon theory finding excellent agreement with the analytic results.We further demonstrate its potential on the interacting sine-Gordon model, studying the scaling of von Neumann entropy in ground states and real-time dynamics following quenches of the model.
Entanglement is the fundamental difference between classical and quantum systems and has become one of the guiding principles in the exploration of high-and low-energy physics.The calculation of entanglement entropies in interacting quantum field theories, however, remains challenging.Here, we present the first method for the explicit computation of reduced density matrices of interacting quantum field theories using truncated Hamiltonian methods.The method is based on constructing an isomorphism between the Hilbert space of the full system and the tensor product of Hilbert spaces of subintervals.This naturally enables the computation of the von Neumann and arbitrary Rényi entanglement entropies as well as mutual information, logarithmic negativity, and other measures of entanglement.Our method is applicable to equilibrium states and nonequilibrium evolution in real time.It is model independent and can be applied to any Hamiltonian truncation method that uses a free basis expansion.We benchmark the method on the free Klein-Gordon theory finding excellent agreement with the analytic results.We further demonstrate its potential on the interacting sine-Gordon model, studying the scaling of von Neumann entropy in ground states and real-time dynamics following quenches of the model.
Understanding the equilibrium properties and out of equilibrium dynamics of quantum field theories are key aspects of fundamental problems in theoretical particle physics and cosmology. However, their classical simulation is highly challenging. In this work, we introduce a tensor network method for the classical simulation of continuous quantum field theories that is suitable for the study of low-energy eigenstates and out-of-equilibrium time evolution. The method is built on Hamiltonian truncation and tensor network techniques, bridging the gap between two successful approaches. One of the key developments is the exact construction of matrix product state representations of global projectors, crucial for the implementation of interacting theories. Despite featuring a relatively high computational effort, our method dramatically improves predictive precision compared to exact diagonalisation-based Hamiltonian truncation, allowing the study of so far unexplored parameter regimes and dynamical effects. We corroborate trust in the accuracy of the method by comparing it with exact theoretical results for ground state properties of the sine-Gordon model. We then proceed with discussing (1+1)-dimensional quantum electrodynamics, the massive Schwinger model, for which we accurately locate its critical point and study the growth and saturation of momentum-space entanglement in sudden quenches.
One of the most important predictions of quantum mechanics is the existence of quantum entanglement. Since the inception of quantum theory, the study of entanglement has become ubiquitous in several branches of physics, from high energy to condensed matter physics and quantum information. To this avail, different measures of entanglement in quantum systems have been introduced. The most successful ones are the von Neumann and the Rényi entanglement entropies, which have been heavily studied both in lattice models and in quantum field theories (QFTs). A different, more complete characterization of entanglement is provided by the entanglement (or modular) Hamiltonian, defined as the logarithm of the reduced density matrix. One of the key property of this operator is that, under generic conditions, in 1+1-dimensional conformal field theories (CFTs) presents a local and few-body structure. Beyond just being of theoretical interest, this property has been recently used to efficiently construct the ground state of spin chains in quantum simulators. A recently introduced generalisation of the entanglement Hamiltonian is the negativity Hamiltonian, a non-Hermitian operator which is more useful for mixed states and tripartite entanglement. In this thesis we study these quantifications in many-body quantum systems and in QFTs. In the first part of the thesis, we focus on fermionic systems at equilibrium, and we obtain analytical expressions for the entanglement and the negativity Hamiltonians in the massless Dirac fermion QFT, both in presence of boundaries and at finite temperature. We compare these predictions in the continuum QFT with numerical calculations on the lattice, showing that a proper comparison requires a non-trivial continuum limit of the lattice expression, which we detail. We also investigate a lattice realisation of a non-unitary CFT, the bc-ghost theory, showing that the entanglement Hamiltonian presents an additional term with respect to the unitary case. In the second part, we study the entanglement entropies in an integrable QFT, the massless renormalisation group flow from the tricritical to the critical Ising CFT, demonstrating that the entropy is monotonically decreasing under the renormalisation group flow, as expected from the entropic c-theorem. In the third part we consider out-of-equilibrium problems. We study the melting of a domain wall configuration, computing analytically the entanglement Hamiltonian and showing that the insertion of a defect dramatically modifies the entanglement properties, changing the growth of the entropies from logarithmic to linear in time. Finally, we study generic quantum quenches in free fermionic theories, using the celebrated quasiparticle picture to obtain a prediction for the evolution of the entanglement Hamiltonian during the quench.
We perform a first-principles, non-perturbative investigation of quantum entanglement between partonic constituents in a strongly coupled 3+1-dimensional scalar Yukawa theory, using light-front Hamiltonian methods with controlled Fock-space truncations. By explicitly constructing reduced density matrices for (mock) nucleon, pion, and anti-nucleon subsystems from light-front wave functions, we compute key entanglement witnesses, including von Neumann entropy, mutual information, and linear entropy, in both quenched (no sea pairs) and unquenched frameworks. We find that the entanglement entropy is closely related to the Shannon entropy of the transverse momentum dependent distribution, establishing a link between quantum information and parton structure. In contrast, the unquenched theory reveals genuinely non-classical correlations: the entanglement entropy cannot be reduced to any Shannon entropy of normalized parton distributions, demonstrating that the full hadronic wave function encodes quantum information beyond classical probabilities. Our findings highlight the role of entanglement as a fundamental probe of non-perturbative dynamics in relativistic quantum field theory and lay the groundwork for extending these concepts to QCD and future collider phenomenology.
As Schroedinger already recognised one century ago, entanglement is at the core of quantum mechanics. Nowadays it turns out to be the fundamental notion behind many quantum phenomena, from quantum algorithms to gravity, passing by critical phenomena and topological phases of matter, triggering unexpected connections between apparently far branches of physics. At the center of all these ideas, we find the (Rényi) entanglement entropies, which are powerful entanglement measures that provide fundamental insights into the investigated system or theory. This motivates the development of techniques for determining it, such as the replica trick: its implementation via the path-integral finds a wide place in this thesis. For example, we develop an efficient strategy to compute a generalised version of the Rényi entropies for all the eigenstates of a (1+1)-dimensional conformal field theory. This represents the starting point for a simulation scheme ideal to compute the entanglement in more generic (1+1)-dimensional quantum field theories (QFTs), e.g. after a quench in the sine-Gordon field theory. The study of entanglement also intertwines with another pillar of modern physics, i.e. symmetries and how their presence influences the properties of a system. Given the interest in this connection, this thesis addresses the question of how the entanglement splits into the different sectors of an internal symmetry. We approach the problem first in the QFT context, both for the free Dirac and complex scalar fields in two-dimensional spacetime, which have an abelian conserved charge, and systems having an internal Lie group symmetry to tackle the non-abelian case. Another typical framework in which we study the symmetry resolution of entanglement is lattice models, where different techniques can be exploited in order to derive exact results, ranging from the corner transfer matrix for gapped integrable systems to the connection between quadratic lattice Hamiltonians and their two-point correlation functions. The symmetry resolution also concerns other entanglement measures, namely, we analyse the behaviour of the operator entanglement, i.e. a key quantifier of the complexity of an operator, the symmetry-resolved mutual information, the effect of symmetries on entanglement negativity. The latter quantity is a genuine measure of quantum correlations in mixed states and a consistent part of the thesis is about this subject. For example, we study its time evolution after a quench and we provide an operatorial characterisation for entanglement in mixed states, which we dub negativity Hamiltonian.
In this work, we explore the effects of a quantum quench on the entanglement measures of a two-body coupled oscillator system having quartic interaction. We use the invariant operator method, under a perturbative framework, for computing the ground state of this system. We give the analytical expressions for the total and reduced density matrix of the system having non-Gaussian, quartic interaction terms. Using this reduced density matrix, we show the analytical calculation of two entanglement measures viz., Von Neumann entanglement entropy using replica trick and Renyi entanglement entropy. Further, we give a numerical estimate of these entanglement measures with respect to the dimensionless parameter $(t/\ensuremath{\delta}t)$ and show its behavior in the three regimes, i.e., late time behavior, around the quench point and the early time behavior. We comment on the variation of these entanglement measures for different orders of coupling strength. The variation of Renyi entropy of different orders has also been discussed.
A new numerical approach to entanglement entropies of the Rényi type is proposed for one-dimensional quantum field theories. The method extends the truncated conformal spectrum approach and we will demonstrate that it is especially suited to study the crossover from massless to massive behavior when the subsystem size is comparable to the correlation length. We apply it to different deformations of massless free fermions, corresponding to the scaling limit of the Ising model in transverse and longitudinal fields. For massive free fermions the exactly known crossover function is reproduced already in very small system sizes. The new method treats ground states and excited states on the same footing, and the applicability for excited states is illustrated by reproducing Rényi entropies of low-lying states in the transverse field Ising model.