Entropy Scaling Law and the Quantum Marginal Problem

Quantum many-body states that frequently appear in physics often obey an entropy scaling law, meaning that an entanglement entropy of a subsystem can be expressed as a sum of terms that scale linearly with its volume and area, plus a correction term that is independent of its size. We conjecture tha...

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Autor principal: Isaac H. Kim
Formato: article
Lenguaje:EN
Publicado: American Physical Society 2021
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Acceso en línea:https://doaj.org/article/5d9e9921e48844a3855cdce4ae81f9d7
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Sumario:Quantum many-body states that frequently appear in physics often obey an entropy scaling law, meaning that an entanglement entropy of a subsystem can be expressed as a sum of terms that scale linearly with its volume and area, plus a correction term that is independent of its size. We conjecture that these states have an efficient dual description in terms of a set of marginal density matrices on bounded regions, obeying the same entropy scaling law locally. We prove a restricted version of this conjecture for translationally invariant systems in two spatial dimensions. Specifically, we prove that a translationally invariant marginal obeying three nonlinear constraints—all of which follow from the entropy scaling law straightforwardly—must be consistent with some global state on an infinite lattice. Moreover, we derive a closed-form expression for the maximum-entropy density compatible with those marginals, deriving a variational upper bound on the thermodynamic free energy. The main assumptions of our construction are satisfied exactly by solvable models of topological order and approximately by finite-temperature Gibbs states of certain quantum spin Hamiltonians.