Detecting the critical point through entanglement in the Schwinger model
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We investigate the quantum statistical properties of the confining string connecting a static fermion-antifermion pair in the massive Schwinger model. By analyzing the reduced density matrix of the subsystem located in between the fermion and antifermion, we demonstrate that as the interfermion separation approaches the string-breaking distance, the overlap between the microscopic density matrix and an effective thermal density matrix exhibits a pronounced, narrow peak, approaching unity at the onset of string breaking. This behavior reveals that the confining flux tube evolves toward a genuinely thermal state as the separation between the charges grows, even in the absence of an external heat bath. In other words, one cannot tell whether a reduced state of the subsystem arises from a surrounding heat bath or from entanglement with the rest of the system. The entanglement spectrum near the critical string-breaking distance exhibits a rapid transition from the dominance of a single state describing the confining electric string towards a strongly entangled state containing virtual fermion-antifermion pairs. Our findings establish a quantitative link between confinement, entanglement, and emergent thermality, and suggest that string breaking corresponds to a microscopic thermalization transition within the flux tube.
Motivated by conjectures in holography relating the entanglement of purification and reflected entropy to the entanglement wedge cross section, we introduce two related non-negative measures of tripartite entanglement g and h. We prove structure theorems which show that states with nonzero g or h have nontrivial tripartite entanglement. We then establish that in one dimension these tripartite entanglement measures are universal quantities that depend only on the emergent low-energy theory. For a gapped system, we argue that either g≠0 and h=0 or g=h=0, depending on whether the ground state has long-range order. For a critical system, we develop a numerical algorithm for computing g and h from a lattice model. We compute g and h for various CFTs and show that h depends only on the central charge whereas g depends on the whole operator content.
Here, we discuss the computational efficiency of the finite-temperature simulation with minimally entangled typical thermal states (METTS). To argue that METTS can be efficiently represented as matrix product states, we present an analytic upper bound for the average entanglement Rényi entropy of METTS for a Rényi index 0 < q ≤ 1. In particular, for one-dimensional (1D) gapless systems described by conformal field theories, the upper bound scales as O(cN 0 logβ) where c is the central charge and N is the system size. Furthermore, we numerically find that the average Rényi entropy exhibits a universal behavior characterized by the central charge and is roughly given by half of the analytic upper bound. Based on these results, we show that METTS can provide a speedup compared to employing the purification method to analyze thermal equilibrium states at low temperatures in 1D gapless systems.
Lectures given at the Theoretical Advanced Study Institute (TASI 2020), 1-26 June 2020. The topics covered include quantum circuits, entanglement, quantum teleportation, Bell inequalities, quantum entropy and decoherence, classical versus quantum measurement, the area law for entanglement entropy in quantum field theory, and simulating quantum field theory on a quantum computer. Along the way we confront the fundamental sloppiness of how we all learned (and some of us taught) quantum mechanics in college. Links to a Python notebook and Mathematica notebooks will allow the reader to reproduce and extend the calculations, as well as perform five experiments on a quantum simulator.
We consider black holes in 2d de Sitter JT gravity coupled to a CFT, and entangled with matter in a disjoint non-gravitating universe. Tracing out the entangling matter leaves the CFT in a density matrix whose stress tensor backreacts on the de Sitter geometry, lengthening the wormhole behind the black hole horizon. Naively, the entropy of the entangling matter increases without bound as the strength of the entanglement increases, but the monogamy property predicts that this growth must level off. We compute the entropy via the replica trick, including wormholes between the replica copies of the de Sitter geometry, and find a competition between conventional field theory entanglement entropy and the surface area of extremal “islands” in the de Sitter geometry. The black hole and cosmological horizons both play a role in generating such islands in the backreacted geometry, and have the effect of stabilizing the entropy growth as required by monogamy. We first show this in a scenario in which the de Sitter spatial section has been decompactified to an interval. Then we consider the compact geometry, and argue for a novel interpretation of the island formula in the context of closed universes that recovers the Page curve. Finally, we comment on the application of our construction to the cosmological horizon in empty de Sitter space.
We review the various aspects of the 3D Einstein gravity theory with a negative cosmological constant and its boundary description. We also explore its connections to conformal field theories (CFTs), modular symmetry, and holography. It is worth noting that this particular theory is topological in nature, which means that all the physical degrees of freedom are located on the boundary. Additionally, we can derive the boundary description on a torus, which takes the form of a 2D Schwarzian theory. This observation suggests that the relevant degrees of freedom for the theory can be described using this 2D theory. Because of the renormalizability of the 3D gravity theory, one can probe the quantum regime. This suggests that it is possible to investigate quantum phenomena. Unlike the conventional CFTs, when considering the AdS 3 background, the boundary theory loses modular symmetry. This represents a departure from the usual behavior of CFT and is quite intriguing. The Weyl transformation induces anomaly in CFTs, and we indicate that applying this transformation to the 2D Schwarzian theory leads to similar results. Summing over all geometries with the asymptotic AdS 3 boundary condition is equivalent to summing over a modular group. The partition function is one-loop exact and therefore an analytical expression from the summation. This theory holds potential applications in Quantum Information and is a recurring theme in the study of holography, where gravitational theories are connected with CFTs.
We prove the Penrose-Wall singularity theorem in the full semiclassical gravity regime, significantly expanding its range of validity. To accomplish this, we modify the definition of quantum-trapped surfaces without affecting their genericity. Our theorem excludes controlled “bounces” in the interior of a black hole and in a large class of cosmologies.
Measurements of the spin correlation coefficients in the beam basis are presented for top quark-antiquark $(t\bar{t})$ systems produced in proton-proton collisions at $\sqrt{s}$ = 13 TeV collected by the CMS experiment in 2016–2018, and corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 138 fb −1 . The $t\bar{t}$ system is reconstructed from final states containing an electron or muon and jets. Together with the previously reported results in the helicity basis, these measurements are used to decompose the system into the Bell and spin eigenstates in various kinematic regions. The spin correlation coefficients are also used to evaluate properties of the $t\bar{t}$ quantum state, such as the purity, von Neumann entropy, and entanglement. All results are consistent with standard model predictions.
In discrete quantum systems, quantum decoherence is the disappearance of simple phase relations as a result of interactions with an environment. For many applications, the question is not necessarily how to avoid (inevitable) system-environment interactions, but rather how to design environments that optimally preserve a system's phase relations in spite of such interactions. The formation of system-environment entanglement is a major driving mechanism for decoherence, and a detailed understanding of this process could inform strategies for conserving coherence optimally. This requires scalable, flexible, and systematically improvable quantum dynamical methods that retain detailed information about the entanglement properties of the environment, yet very few current methods offer this combination of features. Here, in this work, we address this need by introducing a theoretical framework wherein we combine the truncated Wigner approximation with standard time-dependent perturbation theory, allowing for computing expectation values of operators in the combined system-environment Hilbert space. We demonstrate the utility of this framework by applying it to the spin-boson model, representative of qubits and simple donor-acceptor systems. For this model, our framework provides an analytical description of perturbative contributions to expectation values. We monitor how quantum decoherence at zero temperature is accompanied by entanglement formation with individual environmental degrees of freedom. Based on this entanglement behavior, we find that the selective suppression of low-frequency environmental modes is particularly effective for mitigating quantum decoherence.
We review a kinetically constrained pair-hopping model that arises within a Landau level in the quantum Hall effect. At filling ν = 1/3, the model exactly maps onto the so-called “PXP model,” a constrained model for the Rydberg atom chain that is numerically known to exhibit ETH-violating states in the middle of the spectrum or quantum many-body scars. Indeed, particular charge density wave configurations exhibit the same revivals seen in the PXP model. We generalize the mapping to fillings factors ν = p/(2p+1), and show that the model is equivalent to nonintegrable spin chains within particular constrained Krylov Hilbert spaces. These lead to new examples of quantum many-body scars which manifest as revivals and slow thermalization of particular charge density wave states. Finally, we investigate the stability of the quantum scars under certain Hamiltonian perturbations motivated by the fractional quantum Hall physics.
The entanglement properties of neutron-proton scattering are investigated using a measure that counts the number of entangled pairs produced by the action of a scattering operator on a given initial neutron-proton state. All phase shifts relevant for scattering at laboratory energies up to 350 MeV are used. Entanglement is found to depend strongly on the initial state. Entanglement is maximized in very low energy scattering if the initial spin state is | ↑ ↓ >, but not if the initial state is | ↑ ↑ > . At such energies the Hamiltonian obeys Wigner SU(4) symmetry, and an entanglement maximum is a sign of that symmetry. At higher energies the angular dependence of entanglement is strong and the entanglement is large for many scattering angles. Furthermore, the tensor force is shown to play a significant role in producing entanglement at laboratory kinetic energies greater than about 50 MeV.
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Collective neutrino oscillations can potentially play an important role in transporting lepton flavor in astrophysical scenarios where the neutrino density is large, typical examples are the early universe and supernova explosions. It has been argued in the past that simple models of the neutrino Hamiltonian designed to describe forward scattering can support substantial flavor evolution on very short timescales t ≈ log(N) / (G Fρν ), with N the number of neutrinos, G F the Fermi constant and ρ ν the neutrino density. This finding is in tension with results for similar but exactly solvable models for which t ≈ √N/(G Fρν ) instead. In this work we provide a coherent explanation of this tension in terms of dynamical phase transitions (DPT) and study the possible impact that a DPT could have in more realistic models of neutrino oscillations and their mean-field approximation.
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