Statistics of Marginal Wavefunctions as a Real-Space Diagnostic of Quantum Entanglement

Abstract:We present a statistical framework for extracting spatially resolved entanglement directly from an ensemble of marginal (one-body) wavefunctions in Time-Dependent Quantum Monte Carlo (TDQMC). Treating the guide waves as a statistical mixture in Hilbert space, we show that the Gram matrix acts as a covariance operator whose spectrum coincides with the Schmidt spectrum. The associated functional standard deviation closely tracks the von Neumann entanglement entropy both globally and locally via walker partitioning, providing a physically transparent real-space diagnostic of quantum correlations without requiring construction of the full many-body wavefunction. Applications to one-dimensional two-electron bosonic and fermionic systems (helium atom and hydrogen-like molecule) demonstrate excellent agreement with strict conditional-wave results for opposite-spin electrons. For same-spin fermions, TDQMC's statistical treatment of exchange symmetry avoids the unphysical negative local entropies that arise from naive ln(2) subtraction, yielding spatial profiles that remain positive throughout. The method establishes a direct bridge between classical ensemble statistics and quantum entanglement measures, offering a computationally efficient real-space diagnostic tool for mapping the spatial distribution of correlations in many-body systems.

arXiv:2605.01728 [quant-ph]

(or arXiv:2605.01728v2 [quant-ph] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2605.01728 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite

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