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Entanglement of Coupled Harmonic Oscillators

H. Snijder

Published Jan 1, 2019• 0 citations
OpenAlex

Abstract

The entropy of a black hole scales with its area. This is a puzzling feature in the context of statistical mechanics, where entropy scales with volume. It is argued that entanglement entropy underlays such an area law. This quantity is hard to calculate because a precise understanding of the underlying quantum state is needed. Therefore it is interesting to study a Schwarzschild analogue in a photon condensate which is an exactly known quantum system in the ground-state mimicking the behaviour of an astronomic black hole. A harmonic chain of size $N$ with a constant spring constant is studied as a toy model, of which the entanglement entropy is calculated by tracing out $N-l$ oscillators. This separation of two regions can be interpret as separating the inner and outer regions of a black hole. The resulting entanglement entropy is considered for the discrete chain as well for $N\\rightarrow\\infty$, which represents the Klein-Gordon field on a flat background and with a UV cut-off. For large $N$, the entropy converge to the limit case. The performed numerical simulations hints at an area law with logarithmic corrections, given by $S=\\frac{0.2776}{3} \\ln{\\bigg{(} \\frac{N}{\\pi }\\sin{\\frac{\\pi l}{N}}\\bigg{)}} + 0.6421$ in the discrete case and $S=\\frac{0.3744}{3} \\ln{l} + 0.6421$ in the infinite case.

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The entropy of a black hole scales with its area. This is a puzzling feature in the context of statistical mechanics, where entropy scales with volume. It is argued that entanglement entropy underlays such an area law. This quantity is hard to calculate because a precise understanding of the underlying quantum state is needed. Therefore it is interesting to study a Schwarzschild analogue in a photon condensate which is an exactly known quantum system in the ground-state mimicking the behaviour of an astronomic black hole. A harmonic chain of size NNN with a constant spring constant is studied as a toy model, of which the entanglement entropy is calculated by tracing out N−lN-lN−l oscillators. This separation of two regions can be interpret as separating the inner and outer regions of a black hole. The resulting entanglement entropy is considered for the discrete chain as well for NrightarrowinftyN\\rightarrow\\inftyNrightarrowinfty, which represents the Klein-Gordon field on a flat background and with a UV cut-off. For large NNN, the entropy converge to the limit case. The performed numerical simulations hints at an area law with logarithmic corrections, given by S=frac0.27763lnbigg(fracNpisinfracpilNbigg)+0.6421S=\\frac{0.2776}{3} \\ln{\\bigg{(} \\frac{N}{\\pi }\\sin{\\frac{\\pi l}{N}}\\bigg{)}} + 0.6421S=frac0.27763lnbigg(fracNpisinfracpilNbigg)+0.6421 in the discrete case and S=frac0.37443lnl+0.6421S=\\frac{0.3744}{3} \\ln{l} + 0.6421S=frac0.37443lnl+0.6421 in the infinite case.
It has been known for decades that black holes behave as thermodynamic objects and, as such, have an entropy, which was acquired in exact form as the Bekenstein-Hawking entropy. However, the origin of this entropy, and in particular its proportionality to the area of the horizon, remained unexplained. Motivated by this mystery, several authors examined the possibility of entanglement entropy as a source of black hole entropy, by considering a scalar ?eld in the ground state and\ntracing out the degrees of freedom inside an imaginary sphere, analogous to the interior of the black hole. The resulting entanglement entropy between the two regions turned out to scale with the area of their mutual boundary. In the simplest model the scalar ?eld is represented by a system of coupled harmonic oscillators. After an introduction to the phenomenon of quantum entanglement and the associated entanglement entropy, we will review the problem of two coupled oscillators in the ground state and derive the entanglement entropy using an approach in Fock space, as opposed to the standard method involving integrals in positon space. This will also\nallow us to look at some excited states of the system. Subsequently we will try to extend this approach to a system of N coupled harmonic oscillators and derive the entanglement entropy between an inner and outer region of oscillators.
We introduce a method to numerically compute the entanglement entropy of an acoustic black hole. It is shown that the entanglement entropy of sufficiently large subregions scales linearly with size and thus shows a volume law instead of an area law. The origin of this scaling can be traced back to the non-separable long-distance correlations due to the production of phonon pairs at the horizon. The system is shown to be locally thermal, such that the part of the entanglement entropy scaling with volume is well approximated by the thermal entropy of the outgoing Hawking radiation.
We reexamine the idea that the origin of black-hole entropy may lie in the entanglement of quantum fields between the inside and outside of the horizon. Motivated by the observation that certain modes of gravitational fluctuations in a black-hole background behave as scalar fields, we compute the entanglement entropy of such a field, by tracing over its degrees of freedom inside a sphere. We show that while this entropy is proportional to the area of the sphere when the field is in its ground state, a correction term proportional to a fractional power of area results when the field is in a superposition of ground and excited states. The area law is thus recovered for large areas. Further, we identify the location of the degrees of freedom that give rise to the above entropy.
It is well-known that entanglement entropy in field theory at its ground state is dominated by an area law term, presenting a similarity to the entropy of black holes. It is interesting to investigate whether this similarity can be extended by showing that gravitational dynamics emerges from the first law of entanglement thermodynamics. Answering this question requires the specification of the modular Hamiltonian. Motivated by the above, we study entanglement in the toy model of harmonic systems lying at any classicalmost state, i.e. any coherent state. We specify explicitly the reduced density matrix and its time-evolution, as well as the modular Hamiltonian. Interestingly, the time evolution is unitary and we specify the effective Hamiltonian which generates it. Our results provide the tools to investigate the similarity between gravity and entanglement in discretized free scalar field theory in the framework of (Phys Rev Lett 71:666, 1993).
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.
We revisit the problem of finding the entanglement entropy of a scalar field on a lattice by tracing over its degrees of freedom inside a sphere. It is known that this entropy satisfies the area law---entropy proportional to the area of the sphere---when the field is assumed to be in its ground state. We show that the area law continues to hold when the scalar field degrees of freedom are in generic coherent states and a class of squeezed states. However, when excited states are considered, the entropy scales as a lower power of the area. This suggests that, for large horizons, the ground state entropy dominates, whereas entropy due to excited states gives power-law corrections. We discuss possible implications of this result to black hole entropy.