Exploring Large-Scale Entanglement in Quantum Simulation

Understand

Entanglement is a distinguishing feature of quantum many-body systems, and uncovering the entanglement structure for large particle numbers in quantum simulation experiments is a fundamental challenge in quantum information science.

• Here we perform experimental investigations of entanglement based on the entanglement Hamiltonian, as an effective description of the reduced density operator for large subsystems.
• We prepare ground and excited states of a 1D XXZ Heisenberg chain on a 51-ion programmable quantum simulator and perform sample-efficient `learning' of the entanglement Hamiltonian for subsystems of up to 20 lattice sites.
• Our experiments provide compelling evidence for a local structure of the entanglement Hamiltonian.