Hysteretic squashed entanglement in many-body quantum systems

Abstract

Entanglement in many-body quantum systems is distributed across spatial regions, where its structure often dictates the information-processing capabilities of the state. Yet, characterizing the entanglement structure, especially for mixed states, remains a challenge. In this work, we propose hysteretic squashed entanglement $T_{sq}$, a conditional entanglement monotone that measures the genuine quantum correlations between two subregions, conditioned on a third region, in a many-body quantum state. $T_{sq}$ is upper bounded by the convex-roof extension of quantum conditional mutual information and exhibits several desirable properties like monogamy, convexity, asymptotic continuity, faithfulness, and additivity for tensor-product states. We study the conditional entanglement generation in a one-dimensional transverse-field Ising model under quench, where we show that $T_{sq}$ effectively squashes classical contributions and can detect genuine quantum correlations across both adjacent and long-range subsystems. We elucidate the utility of this measure as a robust quantifier of topological entanglement entropy for mixed states. This opens new operational resource-theoretic avenues for probing topological order and criticality.