Spatial entanglement sudden death

Speaker: Samuel Scalet (University of California, Davis)
Series: Isaac Newton Institute Seminar Series
Note: MMBW03 - Structure of entanglement

The characterization of entanglement in quantum many-body systems is to a large part based on results that characterize classical and quantum correlations jointly. In many "well-behaved" scenarios an asymptotic decay of correlations in the form of correlation functions or mutual information has been shown. In this talk I will explain how entanglement between distant parties in many-body systems can vanish exactly at a finite length scale, rather than merely decay asymptotically. A main result is the entanglement sudden death in thermal states of 1D systems at any nonzero temperature. I will further discuss the case of ground states, where a weaker version of the entanglement sudden death holds under a gap assumption in arbitrary dimension. Finally, I present an equivalence of entanglement sudden death for pure states in 1D with a matrix product structure.

Based on:

S.O.S. Spatial entanglement sudden death in spin chains at all temperatures. Lett Math Phys 116, 121 (2026)
R. Ferydouni, T. Jackson, S.O.S. Entanglement Sudden Death in Gapped Ground States. arXiv:2610.17038