In this work, we make a connection between two seemingly different problems.
The first problem involves characterizing the properties of entanglement in the
ground state of gapped local Hamiltonians, which is a central topic in quantum
many-body physics. The second problem is on the quantum communication
complexity of testing bipartite states with EPR assistance, a well-known
question in quantum information theory. We construct a communication protocol
for testing (or measuring) the ground state and use its communication
complexity to reveal a new structural property for the ground state
entanglement. This property, known as the entanglement spread, roughly measures
the ratio between the largest and the smallest Schmidt coefficients across a
cut in the ground state. Our main result shows that gapped ground states
possess limited entanglement spread across any cut, exhibiting an "area law"
behavior. Our result quite generally applies to any interaction graph with an
improved bound for the special case of lattices. This entanglement spread area
law includes interaction graphs constructed in [Aharonov et al., FOCS'14] that
violate a generalized area law for the entanglement entropy. Our construction
also provides evidence for a conjecture in physics by Li and Haldane on the
entanglement spectrum of lattice Hamiltonians [Li and Haldane, PRL'08]. On the
technical side, we use recent advances in Hamiltonian simulation algorithms
along with quantum phase estimation to give a new construction for an
approximate ground space projector (AGSP) over arbitrary interaction graphs.Comment: 29 pages, 1 figur