Area laws and entanglement distillability of thermal states

TL;DR

This paper investigates the entanglement distillability of thermal states in many-body systems, exploring the emergence of bound entanglement under area laws and its persistence in large systems.

Contribution

It extends previous work on bound entanglement in systems obeying area laws to more general topologies and the thermodynamic limit.

Findings

Bound entanglement appears in systems satisfying an entanglement area law.

Bound entanglement can persist in the macroscopic limit of infinite particles.

Results extend to topologies not obeying the area law.

Abstract

We study the entanglement distillability properties of thermal states of many-body systems. Following the ideas presented in [D.Cavalcanti et al., arxiv:0705.3762], we first discuss the appearance of bound entanglement in those systems satisfying an entanglement area law. Then, we extend these results to other topologies, not necessarily satisfying an entanglement area law. We also study whether bound entanglement survives in the macroscopic limit of an infinite number of particles.