Exact entanglement in the driven quantum symmetric simple exclusion process

Abstract

Entanglement properties of driven quantum systems can potentially differ from the equilibrium situation due to long range coherences. We confirm this observation by studying a suitable toy model for mesoscopic transport: the open quantum symmetric simple exclusion process (QSSEP). We derive exact formulae for its mutual information between different subsystems in the steady state and show that it satisfies a volume law. Surprisingly, the QSSEP entanglement properties only depend on data related to its transport properties and we suspect that such a relation might hold for more general mesoscopic systems. Exploiting the free probability structure of QSSEP, we obtain these results by developing a new method to determine the eigenvalue spectrum of sub-blocks of random matrices from their so-called local free cumulants - a mathematical result on its own with potential applications in the theory of random matrices. As an illustration of this method, we show how to compute expectation values of observables in systems satisfying the Eigenstate Thermalization Hypothesis (ETH) from the local free cumulants.