Measuring entanglement entropies in many-body systems

Journal Article · Fri Sep 15 00:00:00 EDT 2006 · Physical Review. A

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PHYSREVA.74.032306· OSTI ID:20857659

Klich, Israel; Refael, Gil ^[1]; Silva, Alessandro ^[2]

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1. Department of Physics, California Institute of Technology, MC 114-36 Pasadena, California 91125 (United States)
2. Abdus Salam ICTP, Strada Costiera 11, 34100 Trieste (Italy)

We explore the relation between entanglement entropy of quantum many-body systems and the distribution of corresponding, properly selected, observables. Such a relation is necessary to actually measure the entanglement entropy. We show that, in general, the Shannon entropy of the probability distribution of certain symmetry observables gives a lower bound to the entropy. In some cases this bound is saturated and directly gives the entropy. We also show other cases in which the probability distribution contains enough information to extract the entropy: we show how this is done in several examples including BEC wave functions, the Dicke model, XY spin chain, and chains with strong randomness.

• OSTI ID: 20857659
• Journal Information: Physical Review. A, Vol. 74, Issue 3; Other Information: DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevA.74.032306; (c) 2006 The American Physical Society; Country of input: International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA); ISSN 1050-2947
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

Related Subjects

74 ATOMIC AND MOLECULAR PHYSICS
36 MATERIALS SCIENCE
BOSE-EINSTEIN CONDENSATION
DISTRIBUTION
ENTROPY
MANY-BODY PROBLEM
PROBABILITY
QUANTUM ENTANGLEMENT
QUANTUM MECHANICS
RANDOMNESS
SPIN
SYMMETRY
WAVE FUNCTIONS