Symmetry enforces entanglement at high temperatures

Abstract:Many-body quantum systems with local interactions undergo ``sudden death of entanglement" at high temperatures, whereby thermal states become classical mixtures of product states. We investigate whether symmetry constraints can prevent this phenomenon. We prove that strongly symmetric thermal states (canonical ensemble) of generic Hamiltonians with on-site Abelian symmetries remain entangled with non-zero entanglement negativity at arbitrarily high temperatures, under mild conditions on the symmetry actions and the charge sector of the strong symmetry. Our results extend to weakly symmetric thermal states (Gibbs ensemble) under superselection rules, which restrict state decompositions to be symmetric. In particular, we show that fermionic Gibbs states evade sudden death of entanglement and have persistent fermionic negativity at high temperatures, proving along the way some existing conjectures about fermionic entanglement. These findings demonstrate that global symmetry correlations can preserve quantum entanglement despite thermal decoherence, providing new insights into the interplay between symmetry and quantum information in thermal equilibrium.

Quantum Physics (quant-ph); Statistical Mechanics (cond-mat.stat-mech)

arXiv:2508.20166 [quant-ph]

(or arXiv:2508.20166v3 [quant-ph] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2508.20166 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite

Phys. Rev. A 114, 022458 (2026)

https://doi.org/10.1103/rckt-3lfm Focus to learn more DOI(s) linking to related resources

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