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.

Colloquium: Area laws for the entanglement entropy

We provide a derivation of holographic entanglement entropy for spherical entangling surfaces. Our construction relies on conformally mapping the boundary CFT to a hyperbolic geometry and observing that the vacuum state is mapped to a thermal state in the latter geometry. Hence the conformal transformation maps the entanglement entropy to the thermodynamic entropy of this thermal state. The AdS/CFT dictionary allows us to calculate this thermodynamic entropy as the horizon entropy of a certain topological black hole. In even dimensions, we also demonstrate that the universal contribution to the entanglement entropy is given by A-type trace anomaly for any CFT, without reference to holography.

Towards a derivation of holographic entanglement entropy

A Practical Introduction to Tensor Networks: Matrix Product States and Projected Entangled Pair States

We review the conformal field theory approach to entanglement entropy in 1+1 dimensions. We show how to apply these methods to the calculation of the entanglement entropy of a single interval, and the generalization to different situations such as finite size, systems with boundaries and the case of several disjoint intervals. We discuss the behaviour away from the critical point and the spectrum of the reduced density matrix. Quantum quenches, as paradigms of non-equilibrium situations, are also considered.

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Entanglement entropy and conformal field theory

Entanglement is one of the most intriguing features of quantum mechanics. It describes non-local correlations between quantum objects, and is at the heart of quantum information sciences. Entanglement is now being studied in diverse fields ranging from condensed matter to quantum gravity. However, measuring entanglement remains a challenge. This is especially so in systems of interacting delocalized particles, for which a direct experimental measurement of spatial entanglement has been elusive. Here, we measure entanglement in such a system of itinerant particles using quantum interference of many-body twins. Making use of our single-site-resolved control of ultracold bosonic atoms in optical lattices, we prepare two identical copies of a many-body state and interfere them. This enables us to directly measure quantum purity, Renyi entanglement entropy, and mutual information. These experiments pave the way for using entanglement to characterize quantum phases and dynamics of strongly correlated many-body systems.

Measuring entanglement entropy in a quantum many-body system

We study the "entanglement spectrum" (a presentation of the Schmidt decomposition analogous to a set of "energy levels") of a many-body state, and compare the Moore-Read model wave function for the nu=5/2 fractional quantum Hall state with a generic 5/2 state obtained by finite-size diagonalization of the second-Landau-level-projected Coulomb interactions. Their spectra share a common "gapless" structure, related to conformal field theory. In the model state, these are the only levels, while in the "generic" case, they are separated from the rest of the spectrum by a clear "entanglement gap", which appears to remain finite in the thermodynamic limit. We propose that the low-lying entanglement spectrum can be used as a "fingerprint" to identify topological order.

Entanglement Spectrum as a Generalization of Entanglement Entropy: Identification of Topological Order in Non-Abelian Fractional Quantum Hall Effect States

Hui Li

Papers

Entanglement Spectrum as a Generalization of Entanglement Entropy: Identification of Topological Order in Non-Abelian Fractional Quantum Hall Effect States