We review some recent rigorous results on scaling laws of entanglement properties in quantum many body systems. More specifically, we study the entanglement of a region with its surrounding and determine its scaling behaviour with its size for systems in the ground and thermal states of bosonic and fermionic lattice systems. A theorem connecting entanglement between a region and the rest of the lattice with the surface area of the boundary between the two regions is presented for non-critical systems in arbitrary spatial dimensions. The entanglement scaling in the field limit exhibits a peculiar difference between fermionic and bosonic systems. In one-spatial dimension a logarithmic divergence is recovered for both bosonic and fermionic systems. In two spatial dimensions in the setting of half-spaces however we observe strict area scaling for bosonic systems and a multiplicative logarithmic correction to such an area scaling in fermionic systems. Similar questions may be posed and answered in classical systems.
We review some recent rigorous results on scaling laws of entanglement properties in quantum many body systems. More specifically, we study the entanglement of a region with its surrounding and determine its scaling behaviour with its size for systems in the ground and thermal states of bosonic and fermionic lattice systems. A theorem connecting entanglement between a region and the rest of the lattice with the surface area of the boundary between the two regions is presented for non-critical systems in arbitrary spatial dimensions. The entanglement scaling in the field limit exhibits a peculiar difference between fermionic and bosonic systems. In one-spatial dimension a logarithmic divergence is recovered for both bosonic and fermionic systems. In two spatial dimensions in the setting of half-spaces however we observe strict area scaling for bosonic systems and a multiplicative logarithmic correction to such an area scaling in fermionic systems. Similar questions may be posed and answered in classical systems.
The entanglement entropy of a distinguished region of a quantum many-body system reflects the entanglement in its pure ground state. Here we establish scaling laws for this entanglement in critical quasifree fermionic and bosonic lattice systems, without resorting to numerical means. We consider the setting of D-dimensional half-spaces which allows us to exploit a connection to the one-dimensional case. Intriguingly, we find a difference in the scaling properties depending on whether the system is bosonic-where an area law is proven to hold-or fermionic where we determine a logarithmic correction to the area law, which depends on the topology of the Fermi surface. We find Lifshitz quantum phase transitions accompanied with a nonanalyticity in the prefactor of the leading order term.
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.
We demonstrate that the entropy of entanglement and the distillable entanglement of regions with respect to the rest of a general harmonic-lattice system in the ground or a thermal state scale at most as the boundary area of the region. This area law is rigorously proven to hold true in noncritical harmonic-lattice systems of arbitrary spatial dimension, for general finite-ranged harmonic interactions, regions of arbitrary shape, and states of nonzero temperature. For nearest-neighbor interactions---corresponding to the Klein-Gordon case---upper and lower bounds to the degree of entanglement can be stated explicitly for arbitrarily shaped regions, generalizing the findings of Phys. Rev. Lett. 94, 060503 (2005). These higher-dimensional analogs of the analysis of block entropies in the one-dimensional case show that under general conditions, one can expect an area law for the entanglement in noncritical harmonic many-body systems. The proofs make use of methods from entanglement theory, as well as of results on matrix functions of block-banded matrices. Disordered systems are also considered. We moreover construct a class of examples for which the two-point correlation length diverges, yet still an area law can be proven to hold. We finally consider the scaling of classical correlations in a classical harmonic system and relate it to a quantum lattice system with a modified interaction. We briefly comment on a general relationship between criticality and area laws for the entropy of entanglement.
In many-body systems the extent and range of spatial quantum correlations induced by entanglement provide a great deal of information about several qualitative physical properties. One way of studying this information is to examine the scaling behaviour of the ground state entanglement entropy with respect to a scaled version of a distinguished spatial subregion. In various systems the entanglement entropy grows proportionally to the surface area of the subregion which is referred to as an area law. In this thesis we examine the connection between the scaling behaviour of the entanglement entropy and many-body localisation. In recent years it was show that a number of systems, which are known to be in the localised phase, exhibit area laws of the entanglement entropy. It is commonly expected that the entanglement entropies of delocalised ground states do not satisfy area laws, though not many examples of different scaling behaviours have been shown, yet. The aim of this thesis is to provide further examples of violations of area laws in the context of delocalised systems. In three different models we show that the entanglement entropy of the ground states grows at least like a logarithmically enhanced area law. The first part of this thesis, based on joint work with P. Müller and L. Pastur [MPS20], considers the random dimer model. Even though this non-interacting, one-dimensional model is spectrally localised, there exist critical points in its spectrum at which the localisation length diverges. We consider the ground state corresponding to a Fermi energy positioned at one of these critical energies. In the case of small disorder we show a logarithmic lower bound to the expectation of the entanglement entropy. Moreover, we proof a logarithmic lower bound to the finite-volume entanglement en- tropy at these critical points for any disorder strength. In the second part of this thesis, which is based on joint work with P. Müller [MS20], we consider a multi-dimensional continuum Schrödinger operator, which is given by a perturbation of a negative Laplacian by a compactly supported, bounded potential. We establish both an upper and a lower bound to the entanglement entropy corresponding to a positive Fermi energy. These bounds prove that the scaling behaviour of the entanglement entropy is a logarithmically enhanced area law. This is the same scaling behaviour as the one occurring in the case of free fermions, one of the few delocalised systems for which an asymptotic expansion of the entanglement entropy is known. Finally, in the third and last part, based on joint work with C. Fischbacher [FS20], we consider the finite XXZ spin chain with periodic boundary conditions in the Ising phase. We show that for each eigenvalue in the droplet band there exists at least one eigenvector such that the corresponding entanglement entropy grows at least logarithmically, provided the anisotropy parameter ∆ is sufficiently large. In addition, we show a Combes–Thomas estimate for this model, which may be of independent interest.
We investigate the scaling of the entanglement entropy in an infinite translational invariant Fermionic system of any spatial dimension. The states under consideration are ground states and excitations of tight-binding Hamiltonians with arbitrary interactions. We show that the entropy of a finite region typically scales with the area of the surface times a logarithmic correction. The latter can be traced back to the criticality of the models. The relation between the entanglement entropy and the structure of the Fermi surface is discussed, and it is proven, that the presented scaling law holds whenever the Fermi surface is finite. This is in particular true for all ground states of Hamiltonians with finite range interactions.