A Quantum Information Perspective on Many-Body Dispersive Forces

Despite its ubiquity, the quantum many-body properties of dispersion remain poorly understood. Here, we investigate the entanglement distribution in assemblies of quantum Drude oscillators, minimal models for dispersion-bound systems. We establish an analytic relationship between entanglement and correlation energy and show how entanglement monogamy determines whether many-body corrections to the pair potential are attractive, repulsive, or zero. These findings, demonstrated in trimers and extended lattices, apply in more general chemical environments where dispersion coexists with other cohesive forces.