Mixed-state entanglement and information recovery in thermalized states and evaporating black holes

TL;DR

This paper investigates quantum entanglement and information recovery in thermalized many-body systems and evaporating black holes, revealing new regimes of bound entanglement and a novel time scale for information recovery.

Contribution

It introduces finite-temperature analysis of entanglement measures and information recovery, uncovering qualitative differences from infinite temperature cases and identifying a new time scale $t_b$ in black hole evaporation.

Findings

Existence of bound entanglement in thermalized states.

Identification of a new time scale $t_b$ before the Page time.

Quantum information recovery begins at $t_b$, earlier than previously thought.

Abstract

We study the universal behavior of quantum information-theoretic quantities in thermalized isolated quantum many-body systems and evaporating black holes. In particular, we study a genuine mixed-state entanglement measure called the logarithmic negativity, other correlation measures including the Renyi negativities and the mutual information, and a signature of multipartite entanglement called the reflected entropy. We also probe the feasibility of recovering quantum information from subsystems of a thermalized quantum many-body system or from the radiation of an evaporating black hole, using quantities such as relative entropy and Petz map fidelity. A recently developed technique called the equilibrium approximation allows us to probe these quantities at finite temperature. We find striking qualitative differences from the infinite temperature case, which has been the topic of previous studies using Haar-random states. In particular, we find regimes where the logarithmic negativity is extensive but the mutual information is sub-extensive, indicating a large amount of undistillable, bound entanglement in thermalized states. For evaporating black holes at finite temperature, both the logarithmic negativity and the Petz map fidelity reveal an important new time scale $t_b$, which is earlier than the Page time $t_p$ by a finite fraction of the total evaporation time. We find that $t_b$, as opposed to $t_p$, is the time scale at which quantum entanglement between different parts of the radiation becomes extensive, and the fidelity of information recovery for a large diary thrown into the black hole starts to grow.