Hi guys,
next Tuesday in the group meeting we will have a talk by
Itai Arad who will be visiting throughout the week. Itai
will talk about area law. The title and abstract of his talk
follow below.
Best wishes,
Fernando
Title: A new proof for the 1D area law
Abstract:
Originating from the works of Bekenstein and Hawking on the entropy of
black holes, area laws constitute a central tool for understanding
entanglement and locality properties in quantum systems. Essentially, in a
system that obeys an area law, the entanglement entropy of a bounded region
scales like its boundary area, rather than its volume.
In 2007, in a seminal paper, Hastings proved that all 1D quantum spin
systems with a constant spectral gap obey an area law in their ground
state. The proof was based on the analytical tool of Lieb-Robinson
velocity. A major open problem is whether an area law holds also in 2 or
more dimensions.
In this talk I will present a line of research of the past couple of years
culminating in an alternative, entirely combinatorial proof for the 1D area
law. The proof uses the Chebyshev polynomial to describe the structure of
entanglement in the ground state, yielding an exponentially better bound on
the entanglement entropy compared to Hastings bound. Just a slight
improvement of our parameters would give a sub-volume law for the 2D case;
the combinatorial approach raises hopes that such improvements might be
doable.
Joint work with A. Kitaev, Z. Landau & U. Vazirani
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