Operationally meaningful entanglement measures

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Renato Renner
• Subject Area: Theoretical Condensed Matter Physics
• Term: since 2026
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 550495627

This project combines recent quantum information-theoretic methods from quantum communication and cryptography with Machine Learning techniques to develop entanglement measures suitable for many-body systems. For this we take an operational approach, quantifying entanglement relative to communication tasks such as dense coding. The idea is that the efficiency with which these tasks can be performed by agents accessing different parts of a many-body system characterizes the entanglement present in the system. This operational approach also addresses computational considerations: our measures account only for entanglement that can be feasibly extracted. The ultimate goal of this project is to apply these novel entanglement measures to characterize the many-body systems studied in the other projects. While this is a far-reaching goal that may be challenging to achieve within the first funding period of this RU, we will begin with toy examples that exhibit typical features of entanglement in many-body systems.

• DFG Programme: Research Units
• Subproject of: FOR 5919: Machine learning for complex quantum states
• International Connection: Switzerland
• Partner Organisation: Schweizerischer Nationalfonds (SNF)
• Co-Investigators: Professorin Dr. Annabelle Bohrdt; Professor Dr. Markus Philip Ludwig Heyl; Professor Dr. Florian Kai Marquardt; Dr. Markus Schmitt