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Thermally Activated Long-Range Entanglement from Non-Abelian Conservation Laws

Quantum Physics 2026-07-14 v1 Statistical Mechanics

Abstract

Thermal noise ordinarily suppresses quantum entanglement. We show that a strong non-Abelian conservation law can convert local thermal fluctuations into an unbounded operational resource. For a broad class of finite-range SU(2)SU(2)-invariant spin chains restricted to the global-singlet sector, an explicit representation-space protocol yields YN=12log2N+Oβ(1)Y_N=\frac12\log_2 N+O_\beta(1), and hence EDYNE_{\mathrm{D}}\geq Y_N, throughout a finite high-temperature interval. Local thermal fluctuations produce subsystem spins jNj\sim\sqrt N, whose globally locked irreducible representations contain log2(2j+1)12log2N\log_2(2j+1)\sim\frac12\log_2N ebits. An exactly solvable dimer chain exhibits a sharper effect: its zero-temperature state is unentangled across the cut, whereas every fixed T>0T>0 produces ED=12log2N+C(T)+o(1)E_{\mathrm{D}}=\frac{1}{2}\log_2 N+C(T)+o(1), with crossover scale T(N)Δ/lnNT_*(N)\sim\Delta/\ln N. Exact diagonalization of a nonintegrable chain is consistent with the predicted scaling. Thus heating can activate system-size-diverging distillable entanglement across a macroscopic bipartition when thermalization is confined by a non-Abelian conservation law.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2607.12710,
  title  = {Thermally Activated Long-Range Entanglement from Non-Abelian Conservation Laws},
  author = {Shuai Zeng},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2607.12710},
  year   = {2026}
}