809 research outputs found
Power law violation of the area law in quantum spin chains
The sub-volume scaling of the entanglement entropy with the system's size,
, has been a subject of vigorous study in the last decade [1]. The area law
provably holds for gapped one dimensional systems [2] and it was believed to be
violated by at most a factor of in physically reasonable
models such as critical systems.
In this paper, we generalize the spin model of Bravyi et al [3] to all
integer spin- chains, whereby we introduce a class of exactly solvable
models that are physical and exhibit signatures of criticality, yet violate the
area law by a power law. The proposed Hamiltonian is local and translationally
invariant in the bulk. We prove that it is frustration free and has a unique
ground state. Moreover, we prove that the energy gap scales as , where
using the theory of Brownian excursions, we prove . This rules out the
possibility of these models being described by a conformal field theory. We
analytically show that the Schmidt rank grows exponentially with and that
the half-chain entanglement entropy to the leading order scales as
(Eq. 16). Geometrically, the ground state is seen as a uniform superposition of
all colored Motzkin walks. Lastly, we introduce an external field which
allows us to remove the boundary terms yet retain the desired properties of the
model. Our techniques for obtaining the asymptotic form of the entanglement
entropy, the gap upper bound and the self-contained expositions of the
combinatorial techniques, more akin to lattice paths, may be of independent
interest.Comment: v3: 10+33 pages. In the PNAS publication, the abstract was rewritten
and title changed to "Supercritical entanglement in local systems:
Counterexample to the area law for quantum matter". The content is same
otherwise. v2: a section was added with an external field to include a model
with no boundary terms (open and closed chain). Asymptotic technique is
improved. v1:37 pages, 10 figures. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA, (Nov. 2016
Criticality without frustration for quantum spin-1 chains
Frustration-free (FF) spin chains have a property that their ground state
minimizes all individual terms in the chain Hamiltonian. We ask how entangled
the ground state of a FF quantum spin-s chain with nearest-neighbor
interactions can be for small values of s. While FF spin-1/2 chains are known
to have unentangled ground states, the case s=1 remains less explored. We
propose the first example of a FF translation-invariant spin-1 chain that has a
unique highly entangled ground state and exhibits some signatures of a critical
behavior. The ground state can be viewed as the uniform superposition of
balanced strings of left and right parentheses separated by empty spaces.
Entanglement entropy of one half of the chain scales as log(n)/2 + O(1), where
n is the number of spins. We prove that the energy gap above the ground state
is polynomial in 1/n. The proof relies on a new result concerning statistics of
Dyck paths which might be of independent interest.Comment: 11 pages, 2 figures. Version 2: minor changes in the proof of Lemma
On the sub-permutations of pattern avoiding permutations
There is a deep connection between permutations and trees. Certain
sub-structures of permutations, called sub-permutations, bijectively map to
sub-trees of binary increasing trees. This opens a powerful tool set to study
enumerative and probabilistic properties of sub-permutations and to investigate
the relationships between 'local' and 'global' features using the concept of
pattern avoidance. First, given a pattern {\mu}, we study how the avoidance of
{\mu} in a permutation {\pi} affects the presence of other patterns in the
sub-permutations of {\pi}. More precisely, considering patterns of length 3, we
solve instances of the following problem: given a class of permutations K and a
pattern {\mu}, we ask for the number of permutations whose
sub-permutations in K satisfy certain additional constraints on their size.
Second, we study the probability for a generic pattern to be contained in a
random permutation {\pi} of size n without being present in the
sub-permutations of {\pi} generated by the entry . These
theoretical results can be useful to define efficient randomized pattern-search
procedures based on classical algorithms of pattern-recognition, while the
general problem of pattern-search is NP-complete
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