Light-Cone Structure of Propagation of Entanglement

TL;DR

This paper proves the existence of an effective light-cone for entanglement propagation in bipartite systems with localized couplings, providing bounds on the time needed to transport or maintain entanglement over distances.

Contribution

It establishes a rigorous light-cone structure for entanglement spread, offering a fundamental limit on entanglement transport in quantum networks.

Findings

Effective light-cone for entanglement propagation established

Lower bounds on entanglement transport time derived

Applicable to bipartite systems with localized couplings

Abstract

For a wide class of bipartite systems with localized couplings, we establish existence of an effective light-cone for propagation of entanglement. This result yields a hard lower bound on the time it takes, under ideal conditions (no loss, no decoherence), to transport entanglement to a distant location (say, a node of a graph-structured quantum network), or to maintain it there.