Entanglement, correlations, and the energy gap in many-body quantum systems (11 pages)

Stephen D. Bartlett, Andrew C. Doherty, Mark R. Dowling

Carlos Pineda, T. H. Seligman

Henry L. Haselgrove, Michael A. Nielsen, Tobias J. Osborne

What correlations are present in the ground state of a many-body Hamiltonian? We study the relationship between ground-state correlations, especially entanglement, and the energy gap between the ground and first excited states. We prove several general inequalities which show quantitatively that ground-state correlations between systems not directly coupled by the Hamiltonian necessarily imply a small energy gap.

Xhek Turkeshi

Mark R. Dowling, Andrew C. Doherty, Stephen D. Bartlett

We investigate quantum many-body systems where all low-energy states are entangled. As a tool for quantifying such systems, we introduce the concept of the entanglement gap, which is the difference in energy between the ground-state energy and the minimum energy that a separable (unentangled) state may attain. If the energy of the system lies within the entanglement gap, the state of the system is guaranteed to be entangled. We find Hamiltonians that have the largest possible entanglement gap; for a system consisting of two interacting spin-$1∕2$ subsystems, the Heisenberg antiferromagnet is one such example. We also introduce a related concept, the entanglement-gap temperature: the temperature below which the thermal state is certainly entangled, as witnessed by its energy. We give an example of a bipartite Hamiltonian with an arbitrarily high entanglement-gap temperature for fixed total energy range. For bipartite spin lattices we prove a theorem demonstrating that the entanglement gap necessarily decreases as the coordination number is increased. We investigate frustrated lattices and quantum phase transitions as physical phenomena that affect the entanglement gap.

Paola Ruggiero