Probing two-spin entanglement at quantum criticality on a quantum processor

Abstract

Quantum phase transitions in many-body systems give rise to highly entangled states, and understanding their quantum correlations is crucial for characterizing quantum materials. However, traditional entanglement measures such as entanglement entropy are difficult to interpret for noisy or mixed states and require complex circuits to evaluate. Therefore, we explore the Positive Partial Transpose (PPT) criterion, coupled with overlapping state tomography, as an efficient and scalable spin-spin entanglement witness. It detects pairwise entanglement from reduced density matrices, distinguishes quantum from classical correlations, and applies to both pure and mixed states. It is ideal for studying condensed matter systems prepared on noisy quantum devices as well as future extensions to finite temperatures. We demonstrate the approach on quantum hardware, using variational circuits to prepare quantum critical states with up to 20 qubits and completely map their two-spin entanglement across various quantum phase transitions.