Entanglement Complexity in Many-body Systems from Positivity Scaling Laws

Abstract

Area laws describe how entanglement entropy scales and thus provide important necessary conditions for efficient quantum many-body simulation, but they do not, by themselves, yield a direct measure of computational complexity. Here we introduce a complementary framework based on $p$-particle positivity conditions from reduced density matrix (RDM) theory. These conditions form a hierarchy of $N$-representability constraints for an RDM to correspond to a valid $N$-particle quantum system, becoming exact when the Hamiltonian can be expressed as a convex combination of positive semidefinite $p$-particle operators. We prove a general complexity bound: if a quantum system is solvable with level-$p$ positivity independent of its size, then its entanglement complexity scales polynomially with order $p$. This theorem connects structural constraints on RDMs with computational tractability and provides a rigorous framework for certifying when many-body methods including RDM methods can efficiently simulate correlated quantum matter and materials.