Estimating entanglement monotones of non-pure spin-squeezed states

Abstract: We investigate how to estimate entanglement monotones of general mixed many-body quantum states via lower and upper bounds from entanglement witnesses and separable ansatz states respectively. This allows us to study spin systems on fully-connected graphs at nonzero temperature. We derive lower bounds to distance-like measure from the set of fully separable states based on spin-squeezing inequalities. These are nonlinear expressions based on variances of collective spin operators and are potentially close to optimal in the large particle-number limit, at least for models with two-particle interactions. Concretely, we apply our methods to equilibrium states of the permutation-invariant XXZ model with an external field and investigate entanglement at nonzero temperature close to quantum phase transition (QPT) points in both the ferromagnetic and anti-ferromagnetic cases. We observe that the lower bound becomes tight for zero temperature as well as for the temperature at which entanglement disappears, both of which are thus precisely captured by the spin-squeezing inequalities. We further observe, among other things, that entanglement arises at nonzero temperature close to a QPT even in the ordered phase, where the ground state is separable. This can be considered an entanglement signature of a QPT that may also be visible in experiments.