No Arabic abstract
We present a method to measure the von Neumann entanglement entropy of ground states of quantum many-body systems which does not require access to the system wave function. The technique is based on a direct thermodynamic study of entanglement Hamiltonians, whose functional form is available from field theoretical insights. The method is applicable to classical simulations such as quantum Monte Carlo methods, and to experiments that allow for thermodynamic measurements such as the density of states, accessible via quantum quenches. We benchmark our technique on critical quantum spin chains, and apply it to several two-dimensional quantum magnets, where we are able to unambiguously determine the onset of area law in the entanglement entropy, the number of Goldstone bosons, and to check a recent conjecture on geometric entanglement contribution at critical points described by strongly coupled field theories.
We investigate the scaling of the Renyi $alpha$-entropies in one-dimensional gapped quantum spin models. We show that the block entropies with $alpha > 2$ violate the area law monotonicity and exhibit damped oscillations. Depending on the existence of a factorized ground state, the oscillatory behavior occurs either below factorization or it extends indefinitely. The anomalous scaling corresponds to an entanglement-driven order that is independent of ground-state degeneracy and is revealed by a nonlocal order parameter defined as the sum of the single-copy entanglement over all blocks.
We study the entanglement transition in monitored Brownian SYK chains in the large-$N$ limit. Without measurement the steady state $n$-th Renyi entropy is obtained by summing over a class of solutions, and is found to saturate to the Page value in the $nrightarrow 1$ limit. In the presence of measurements, the analytical continuation $nrightarrow 1$ is performed using the cyclic symmetric solution. The result shows that as the monitoring rate increases, a continuous von Neumann entanglement entropy transition from volume-law to area-law occurs at the point of replica symmetry unbreaking.
We conjecture that all connected graphs of order $n$ have von Neumann entropy at least as great as the star $K_{1,n-1}$ and prove this for almost all graphs of order $n$. We show that connected graphs of order $n$ have Renyi 2-entropy at least as great as $K_{1,n-1}$ and for $alpha>1$, $K_n$ maximizes Renyi $alpha$-entropy over graphs of order $n$. We show that adding an edge to a graph can lower its von Neumann entropy.
We show that a class of $mathcal{PT}$ symmetric non-Hermitian Hamiltonians realizing the Yang-Lee edge singularity exhibits an entanglement transition in the long-time steady state evolved under the Hamiltonian. Such a transition is induced by a level crossing triggered by the critical point associated with the Yang-Lee singularity and hence is first-order in nature. At the transition, the entanglement entropy of the steady state jumps discontinuously from a volume-law to an area-law scaling. We exemplify this mechanism using a one-dimensional transverse field Ising model with additional imaginary fields, as well as the spin-1 Blume-Capel model and the three-state Potts model. We further make a connection to the forced-measurement induced entanglement transition in a Floquet non-unitary circuit subject to continuous measurements followed by post-selections. Our results demonstrate a new mechanism for entanglement transitions in non-Hermitian systems harboring a critical point.
Out-of-time-ordered correlation functions (OTOCs) play a crucial role in the study of thermalization, entanglement, and quantum chaos, as they quantify the scrambling of quantum information due to complex interactions. As a consequence of their out-of-time-ordered nature, OTOCs are difficult to measure experimentally. In this Letter we propose an OTOC measurement protocol that does not rely on the reversal of time evolution and is easy to implement in a range of experimental settings. We demonstrate application of our protocol by the characterization of quantum chaos in a periodically driven spin.