Gapped Quantum Systems and Entanglement Area Law

Jaeyoon Cho

Anurag Anshu, Aram W. Harrow, Mehdi Soleimanifar

Karel Van Acoleyen, Michael Mariën, Frank Verstraete

We prove an upper bound on the maximal rate at which a Hamiltonian interaction can generate entanglement in a bipartite system. The scaling of this bound as a function of the subsystem dimension on which the Hamiltonian acts nontrivially is optimal and is exponentially improved over previously known bounds. As an application, we show that a gapped quantum many-body spin system on an arbitrary lattice satisfies an area law for the entanglement entropy if and only if any other state with which it is adiabatically connected (i.e., any state in the same phase) also satisfies an area law.

Jaeyoon Cho

We consider general locally interacting arbitrary-dimensional lattice spin systems that are gapped for any system size. We show under reasonable conditions that nondegenerate ground states of such systems obey the entanglement area law. In so doing, we offer an intuitive picture on how a spectral gap restricts the correlations that a ground state can accommodate and leads to such a special feature.

Donghoon Kim, Tomotaka Kuwahara

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.

Zhexuan Gong, Michael Foss‐Feig, Fernando G. S. L. Brandão +1 more