English

Ground State Entanglement in One Dimensional Translationally Invariant Quantum Systems

Quantum Physics 2015-05-13 v2

Abstract

We examine whether it is possible for one-dimensional translationally-invariant Hamiltonians to have ground states with a high degree of entanglement. We present a family of translationally invariant Hamiltonians {H_n} for the infinite chain. The spectral gap of H_n is Omega(1/poly(n)). Moreover, for any state in the ground space of H_n and any m, there are regions of size m with entanglement entropy Omega(min{m,n}). A similar construction yields translationally-invariant Hamiltonians for finite chains that have unique ground states exhibiting high entanglement. The area law proven by Hastings gives a constant upper bound on the entanglement entropy for 1D ground states that is independent of the size of the region but exponentially dependent on 1/Delta, where Delta is the spectral gap. This paper provides a lower bound, showing a family of Hamiltonians for which the entanglement entropy scales polynomially with 1/Delta. Previously, the best known such bound was logarithmic in 1/Delta.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.0901.1107,
  title  = {Ground State Entanglement in One Dimensional Translationally Invariant Quantum Systems},
  author = {Sandy Irani},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:0901.1107},
  year   = {2015}
}

Comments

22 pages. v2 is the published version, with additional clarifications, publisher's version available at http://jmp.aip.org/resource/1/jmapaq/v51/i2

R2 v1 2026-06-21T11:58:50.362Z