Physical interactions in quantum many-body systems are typically local: Individual constituents interact mainly with their few nearest neighbors. This locality of interactions is inherited by a decay of correlation functions, but also reflected by scaling laws of a quite profound quantity: the entanglement entropy of ground states. This entropy of the reduced state of a subregion often merely grows like the boundary area of the subregion, and not like its volume, in sharp contrast with an expected extensive behavior. Such “area laws” for the entanglement entropy and related quantities have received considerable attention in recent years. They emerge in several seemingly unrelated fields, in the context of black hole physics, quantum information science, and quantum many-body physics where they have important implications on the numerical simulation of lattice models. In this Colloquium the current status of area laws in these fields is reviewed. Center stage is taken by rigorous results on lattice models in one and higher spatial dimensions. The differences and similarities between bosonic and fermionic models are stressed, area laws are related to the velocity of information propagation in quantum lattice models, and disordered systems, nonequilibrium situations, and topological entanglement entropies are discussed. These questions are considered in classical and quantum systems, in their ground and thermal states, for a variety of correlation measures. A significant proportion is devoted to the clear and quantitative connection between the entanglement content of states and the possibility of their efficient numerical simulation. Matrix-product states, higher-dimensional analogs, and variational sets from entanglement renormalization are also discussed and the paper is concluded by highlighting the implications of area laws on quantifying the effective degrees of freedom that need to be considered in simulations of quantum states.

We review selected advances in the theoretical understanding of complex quantum many-body systems with regard to emergent notions of quantum statistical mechanics. We cover topics such as equilibration and thermalisation in pure state statistical mechanics, the eigenstate thermalisation hypothesis, the equivalence of ensembles, non-equilibration dynamics following global and local quenches as well as ramps. We also address initial state independence, absence of thermalisation, and many-body localisation. We elucidate the role played by key concepts for these phenomena, such as Lieb–Robinson bounds, entanglement growth, typicality arguments, quantum maximum entropy principles and the generalised Gibbs ensembles, and quantum (non-)integrability. We put emphasis on rigorous approaches and present the most important results in a unified language.

We establish methods for quantum state tomography based on compressed sensing. These methods are specialized for quantum states that are fairly pure, and they offer a significant performance improvement on large quantum systems. In particular, they are able to reconstruct an unknown density matrix of dimension d and rank r using O(rdlog{}2d) measurement settings, compared to standard methods that require d2 settings. Our methods have several features that make them amenable to experimental implementation: they require only simple Pauli measurements, use fast convex optimization, are stable against noise, and can be applied to states that are only approximately low rank. The acquired data can be used to certify that the state is indeed close to pure, so no a priori assumptions are needed.

Graph states are multiparticle entangled states that correspond to mathematical graphs, where the vertices of the graph take the role of quantum spin systems and edges represent Ising interactions. They are many-body spin states of distributed quantum systems that play a significant role in quantum error correction, multiparty quantum communication, and quantum computation within the framework of the one-way quantum computer. We characterize and quantify the genuine multiparticle entanglement of such graph states in terms of the Schmidt measure, to which we provide upper and lower bounds in graph theoretical terms. Several examples and classes of graphs will be discussed, where these bounds coincide. These examples include trees, cluster states of different dimensions, graphs that occur in quantum error correction, such as the concatenated [7,1,3]-CSS code, and a graph associated with the quantum Fourier transform in the one-way computer. We also present general transformation rules for graphs when local Pauli measurements are applied, and give criteria for the equivalence of two graphs up to local unitary transformations, employing the stabilizer formalism. For graphs of up to seven vertices we provide complete characterization modulo local unitary transformations and graph isomorphisms.