We investigate the quantum entanglement content of quasiparticle excitations in extended many-body systems. We show that such excitations give an additive contribution to the bipartite von Neumann and Rényi entanglement entropies that takes a simple, universal form. It is largely independent of the momenta and masses of the excitations and of the geometry, dimension, and connectedness of the entanglement region. The result has a natural quantum information theoretic interpretation as the entanglement of a state where each quasiparticle is associated with two qubits representing their presence within and without the entanglement region, taking into account quantum (in)distinguishability. This applies to any excited state composed of finite numbers of quasiparticles with finite de Broglie wavelengths or finite intrinsic correlation length. This includes particle excitations in massive quantum field theory and gapped lattice systems, and certain highly excited states in conformal field theory and gapless models. We derive this result analytically in one-dimensional massive bosonic and fermionic free field theories and for simple setups in higher dimensions. We provide numerical evidence for the harmonic chain and the two-dimensional harmonic lattice in all regimes where the conditions above apply. Finally, we provide supporting calculations for integrable spin chain models and other interacting cases without particle production. Our results point to new possibilities for creating entangled states using many-body quantum systems.

• Received 19 June 2018
• Revised 20 September 2018

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.121.170602