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arXiv:hep-th/0605142

Entanglement-Entropy for Groundstates, Low-lying and Highly Excited Eigenstates of General (Lattice) Hamiltonians

Manfred Requardt

Published May 15, 2006• 11 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

We investigate the behavior of entanglement-entropy on a broad scale, that is, a large class of systems, Hamiltonians and states describing the interaction of many degrees of freedom. It is one of our aims to show which general characteristics are responsible for the different types of quantitative behavior of entantglement-entropy. Our main lesson is that what really matters is the degree of degeneracy of the spectrum of certain nearby reference Hamiltonians. For calculational convenience we study primarily systems defined on large but finite regions of regular lattices. We show that general vector states, being not related to some short-range Hamiltonian do not lead in the generic case to an area-like behavior of entanglement-entropy. The situation changes if eigenstates of a Hamiltonian with short-range interactions are studied. We found three broad classes of eigenstates. Global groundstates typically lead to entanglement-entropies of subvolumes proportional to the area of the dividing surface. Macroscopically excited (vector)states have in the generic case an entanglement-entropy which is proportional to the enclosed subvolume and, furthermore, display a certain Gibbsian behavior. Low-lying excited states, on the other hand, lead to an entanglement-entropy which is usually proportional to the logarithm of the enclosed subvolume times the area of the dividing surface .

DOI
10.48550/arxiv.hep-th/0605142

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We investigate the behavior of entanglement-entropy on a broad scale, that is, a large class of systems, Hamiltonians and states describing the interaction of many degrees of freedom. It is one of our aims to show which general characteristics are responsible for the different types of quantitative behavior of entantglement-entropy. Our main lesson is that what really matters is the degree of degeneracy of the spectrum of certain nearby reference Hamiltonians. For calculational convenience we study primarily systems defined on large but finite regions of regular lattices. We show that general vector states, being not related to some short-range Hamiltonian do not lead in the generic case to an area-like behavior of entanglement-entropy. The situation changes if eigenstates of a Hamiltonian with short-range interactions are studied. We found three broad classes of eigenstates. Global groundstates typically lead to entanglement-entropies of subvolumes proportional to the area of the dividing surface. Macroscopically excited (vector)states have in the generic case an entanglement-entropy which is proportional to the enclosed subvolume and, furthermore, display a certain Gibbsian behavior. Low-lying excited states, on the other hand, lead to an entanglement-entropy which is usually proportional to the logarithm of the enclosed subvolume times the area of the dividing surface .
In the spectrum of many-body quantum systems appearing in condensed matter physics, the low-energy eigenstates were the traditional focus of research. The interest in the statistical properties of the full eigenspectrum has grown more recently, in particular in the context of non-equilibrium questions. Wave functions of interacting lattice quantum systems can be characterized either by local observables or by global properties such as the participation ratio (PR) in a many-body basis or the entanglement between various partitions. We present a study of the PR and of the entanglement entropy (EE) between two roughly equal spatial partitions of the system, in all the eigenfunctions of local Hamiltonians. Motivated by the similarity of the PR and EE—both are generically larger in the bulk and smaller near the edges of the spectrum—we quantitatively analyze the correlation between them. We elucidate the effect of (proximity to) integrability, showing how low-entanglement and low-PR states appear also in the middle of the spectrum as one approaches integrable points. We also determine the precise scaling behaviour of the eigenstate-to-eigenstate fluctuations of the PR and EE with respect to system size and characterize the statistical distribution of these quantities near the middle of the spectrum.
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.
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.
Many-body quantum eigenstates of generic Hamiltonians at finite-energy density typically satisfy the ``volume law'' of entanglement entropy: the von Neumann entanglement entropy and the Renyi entropies for a subregion scale in proportion to its volume. Here we provide a connection between the volume law and the sign structure of eigenstates. In particular, we ask the following question: Can a positive wave function support a volume law entanglement? Remarkably, we find that a typical random positive wave function exhibits a constant law for Renyi entanglement entropies Sn{S}_{n}Sn​ for n>1n>1n>1, despite arbitrary large-amplitude fluctuations. We also provide evidence that the modulus of the finite-energy density eigenstates of generic local Hamiltonians shows similar behavior.
We give a detailed theory for the leading coarse-grained dynamics of entanglement entropy of states and of operators in generic short-range interacting quantum many-body systems. This includes operators spreading under Heisenberg time evolution, which we find are much less entangled than "typical" operators of the same spatial support. Extending previous conjectures based on random circuit dynamics, we provide evidence that the leading-order entanglement dynamics of a given chaotic system are determined by a function E(v)\mathcal{E}(v)E(v), which is model-dependent, but which we argue satisfies certain general constraints. In a minimal membrane picture, E(v)\mathcal{E}(v)E(v) is the "surface tension" of the membrane and is a function of the membrane's orientation vvv in spacetime. For one-dimensional (1D) systems this surface tension is related by a Legendre transformation to an entanglement entropy growth rate Γ(∂S/∂x)Γ(\partial S/\partial x)Γ(∂S/∂x) which depends on the spatial "gradient" of the entanglement entropy S(x,t)S(x,t)S(x,t) across the cut at position xxx. We show how to extract the entanglement growth functions numerically in 1D at infinite temperature using the concept of the operator entanglement of the time evolution operator, and we discuss possible universality of E\mathcal{E}E at low temperatures. Our theoretical ideas are tested against and informed by numerical results for a quantum-chaotic 1D spin Hamiltonian. These results are relevant to the broad class of chaotic many-particle systems or field theories with spatially local interactions, both in 1D and above.
Abstract We compute the topological entanglement entropy for a large set of lattice models in d-dimensions. It is well known that many such quantum systems can be constructed out of lattice gauge models. For dimensionality higher than two, there are generalizations going beyond gauge theories, which are called higher gauge theories and rely on higher-order generalizations of groups. Our main concern is a large class of d-dimensional quantum systems derived from Abelian higher gauge theories. In this paper, we derive a general formula for the bipartition entanglement entropy for this class of models, and from it we extract both the area law and the sub-leading terms, which explicitly depend on the topology of the entangling surface. We show that the entanglement entropy SA in a sub-region A is proportional to log (GSDA~) \left({GSD}_{\tilde{A}}\right) (GSDA~​) GSD A ˜ , where GSDA~ {GSD}_{\tilde{A}} GSDA~​ GSD A ˜ is the ground state degeneracy of a particular restriction of the full model to A. The quantity GSDA~ {GSD}_{\tilde{A}} GSDA~​ GSD A ˜ can be further divided into a contribution that scales with the size of the boundary ∂A and a term which depends on the topology of ∂A. There is also a topological contribution coming from A itself, that may be non-zero when A has a non-trivial homology. We present some examples and discuss how the topology of A affects the topological entropy. Our formalism allows us to do most of the calculation for arbitrary dimension d. The result is in agreement with entanglement calculations for known topological models.