title: Thermal bound entanglement in macroscopic systems and area law.
abstract: Does bound entanglement naturally appear in quantum many-body systems? We address this question by showing the existence of bound-entangled thermal states for harmonic oscillator systems consisting of an arbitrary number of particles. By explicit calculations of the negativity for different partitions, we find a range of temperatures for which no entanglement can be distilled by means of local operations, despite the system being globally entangled. We offer an interpretation of this result in terms of entanglement-area laws, typical of these systems. Finally, we discuss generalizations of this result to other systems, including spin chains.
authors: Institut de Ciencies Fotoniques, Mediterranean Technology Park, 08860 Castelldefels, Barcelona, Spain.
authors: Alessandro
authors: A
authors: Ferraro
authors: Daniel
authors: D
authors: Cavalcanti
authors: Artur
authors: A
authors: García-Saez
authors: Antonio
authors: A
authors: Acín