Thermal bound entanglement in macroscopic systems and area laws
Quantum Physics
2009-11-13 v1
Abstract
Does bound entanglement naturally appear in quantum many-body systems? We address this question by showing the existence of bound-entangled thermal states for harmonic oscillator systems consisting of an arbitrary number of particles. By explicit calculations of the negativity for different partitions, we find a range of temperatures for which no entanglement can be distilled by means of local operations, despite the system being globally entangled. We offer an interpretation of this result in terms of entanglement-area laws, typical of these systems. Finally, we discuss generalizations of this result to other systems, including spin chains.
Cite
@article{arxiv.0804.4867,
title = {Thermal bound entanglement in macroscopic systems and area laws},
author = {A. Ferraro and D. Cavalcanti and A. Garcia-Saez and A. Acin},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:0804.4867},
year = {2009}
}
Comments
Short version of arXiv:0705.3762