We construct upper bounds on entanglement entropies of many-body quantum states that have fixed energy expectation values with respect to geometrically 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. As a first application we show that ground-state Schmidt ranks in frustration-free (FF) systems are upper bounded by the ground-state degeneracies of Hamiltonians acting on subsystems. Ground-state von Neumann and Rényi entanglement entropies therefore follow an area law when the zero-temperature thermal entropies of subsystems scale with surface areas, rather than with subsystem volumes. This result holds independently of the spectral gap. 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 upper bounds on half-system entanglement entropies are optimal, up to subleading corrections, in wide varieties of systems. Our results relate physical thermodynamic properties to the structure of many-body Hilbert space at low energies.
We construct upper bounds on entanglement entropies of many-body quantum states that have fixed energy expectation values with respect to geometrically 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. As a first application we show that ground-state Schmidt ranks in frustration-free (FF) systems are upper bounded by the ground-state degeneracies of Hamiltonians acting on subsystems. Ground-state von Neumann and Rényi entanglement entropies therefore follow an area law when the zero-temperature thermal entropies of subsystems scale with surface areas, rather than with subsystem volumes. This result holds independently of the spectral gap. 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 upper bounds on half-system entanglement entropies are optimal, up to subleading corrections, in wide varieties of systems. Our results relate physical thermodynamic properties to the structure of many-body Hilbert space at low energies.
We demonstrate an area law bound on the ground state entanglement entropy of a wide class of gapless quantum states of matter using a strategy called local entanglement thermodynamics. The bound depends only on thermodynamic data, actually a single exponent, the hyperscaling violation exponent $\ensuremath{\theta}$. All systems in d spatial dimensions obeying our scaling assumptions and with $\ensuremath{\theta}<d\ensuremath{-}1$ obey the area law, while systems with $\ensuremath{\theta}=d\ensuremath{-}1$ can violate the area law at most logarithmically. We also discuss the case of frustration-free Hamiltonians and show that to violate the area law more than logarithmically these systems must have an unusually large number of low energy states. Finally, we make contact with the recently proposed s-source framework and argue that $\ensuremath{\theta}$ and s are related by $s={2}^{\ensuremath{\theta}}$.
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.
Quantum many-body states that frequently appear in physics often obey an entropy scaling law, meaning that an entanglement entropy of a subsystem can be expressed as a sum of terms that scale linearly with its volume and area, plus a correction term that is independent of its size.We conjecture that these states have an efficient dual description in terms of a set of marginal density matrices on bounded regions, obeying the same entropy scaling law locally.We prove a restricted version of this conjecture for translationally invariant systems in two spatial dimensions.Specifically, we prove that a translationally invariant marginal obeying three nonlinear constraints-all of which follow from the entropy scaling law straightforwardlymust be consistent with some global state on an infinite lattice.Moreover, we derive a closed-form expression for the maximum-entropy density compatible with those marginals, deriving a variational upper bound on the thermodynamic free energy.The main assumptions of our construction are satisfied exactly by solvable models of topological order and approximately by finite-temperature Gibbs states of certain quantum spin Hamiltonians.
Thermal equilibrium in quantum many-body systems can be fully described by pure quantum states as far as local observables are concerned, while the conventional description of it is based on mixed-state ensembles.The thermodynamic entropy, in that case, is identified with the entanglement entropy of small subsystems.It scales with the size of the subsystem, which is called the volume law of entanglement.When the size of the subsystem increases, however, the correspondence between thermal and entanglement entropies fails and there appears a quantum correction to the simple volume-law scaling.Explicating the scaling of the entanglement entropy with the subsystem size is hence of great importance in connecting quantum physics to thermodynamics as well as analyzing recent experiments on ultracold atoms.In this thesis, we study the volume law of entanglement for pure quantum states representing thermal equilibrium.We derive an analytic formula of the volume law of entanglement for a certain class of pure states called canonical Thermal Pure Quantum (cTPQ) states which represent thermal equilibrium.We illustrate an advantage of the formula by numerically calculating the entanglement entropy of the cTPQ states and applying the formula to it.Furthermore, we argue that our formula universally applies to any sufficiently scrambled pure state, even if the state is not thermal.We consider two examples of such scrambled states, namely, stationary pure states after quantum quench and energy eigenstates of general Hamiltonians with and without integrability.The entanglement entropy of the former states, including actual experimental data in ultracold atoms, is in an excellent agreement with our formula as long as the states are scrambled.For the latter states, we find that our formula works as a good fitting function in non-integrable models to extract information in the thermodynamic limit from finite size systems.We also show that our formula can distinguish eigenstates of integrable models from non-integrable ones.4.3.1 Review of result by Lu and Grover for eigenstates of non-integrable models . . . . . . . . . . . .
By numerically exact calculations of spin-1/2 antiferromagnetic Heisenberg models on small clusters up to 24 sites, we demonstrate that quantum entanglement between subsystems A and B in a pure ground state of a whole system A + B can induce thermal equilibrium in subsystem A. Here, the whole system is bipartitoned with the entanglement cut that covers the entire volume of subsystem A. An effective temperature T A of subsystem A induced by quantum entanglement is not a parameter but can be determined from the entanglement von Neumann entropy S A and the total energy E A of subsystem A calculated for the ground state of the whole system.We show that temperature T A can be derived by minimizing the relative entropy for the reduced density matrix operator of subsystem A and the Gibbs state (i.e., thermodynamic density matrix operator) of subsystem A with respect to the coupling strength between subsystems A and B. Temperature T A is essentially identical to the thermodynamic temperature, for which the entropy and the internal energy evaluated using the canonical ensemble in statistical mechanics for the isolated subsystem A agree numerically with the entanglement entropy S A and the total energy E A of subsystem A. Fidelity calculations ascertain that the reduced density matrix operator of subsystem A for the pure but entangled ground state of the whole system A + B matches, within a maximally 1.5% error in the finite size clusters studied, the thermodynamic density matrix operator of subsystem A at temperature T A , despite that these density-matrix operators are different in general.We also find that temperature T A evaluated from the ground state of the whole system depends insignificantly on the system sizes, which is consistent with the fact that the thermodynamic temperature is an intensive quantity.We argue that quantum fluctuation in an entangled pure state can mimic thermal fluctuation in a subsystem.We also provide two simple but nontrivial analytical examples of free bosons and free fermions for which the two density-matrix operators are exactly the same if the effective temperature T A is adopted.We furthermore discuss implications and possible applications of our finding.
Let H be a frustration-free Hamiltonian describing a 2D grid of qudits with local interactions, a unique ground state, and local spectral gap lower bounded by a positive constant. For any bipartition defined by a vertical cut of length L running from top to bottom of the grid, we prove that the corresponding entanglement entropy of the ground state of H is upper bounded by Õ(L 5/3). For the special case of a 1D chain, our result provides a new area law which improves upon prior work, in terms of the scaling with qudit dimension and spectral gap. In addition, for any bipartition of the grid into a rectangular region A and its complement, we show that the entanglement entropy is upper bounded as Õ(|∂ A|5/3) where ∂ A is the boundary of A. This represents a subvolume bound on entanglement in frustration-free 2D systems. In contrast with previous work, our bounds depend on the local (rather than global) spectral gap of the Hamiltonian. We prove our results using a known method which bounds the entanglement entropy of the ground state in terms of certain properties of an approximate ground state projector (AGSP). To this end, we construct a new AGSP which is based on a robust polynomial approximation of the AND function and we show that it achieves an improved trade-off between approximation error and entanglement.