We prove an upper bound proportional to the surface area for the bipartite entanglement of the ground state and thermal states of harmonic oscillator systems with disorder, as measured by the logarithmic negativity. Our assumptions are satisfied for some standard models that are almost surely gapless in the thermodynamic limit.

We study many-body properties of quantum harmonic oscillator lattices with disorder. A sufficient condition for dynamical localization, expressed as a zero-velocity Lieb-Robinson bound, is formulated in terms of the decay of the eigenfunction correlators for an effective one-particle Hamiltonian. We show how state-of-the-art techniques for proving Anderson localization can be used to prove that these properties hold in a number of standard models. We also derive bounds on the static and dynamic correlation functions at both zero and positive temperature in terms of one-particle eigenfunction correlators. In particular, we show that static correlations decay exponentially fast if the corresponding effective one-particle Hamiltonian exhibits localization at low energies, regardless of whether there is a gap in the spectrum above the ground state or not. Our results apply to finite as well as to infinite oscillator systems. The eigenfunction correlators that appear are more general than those previously studied in the literature. In particular, we must allow for functions of the Hamiltonian that have a singularity at the bottom of the spectrum. We prove exponential bounds for such correlators for some of the standard models.

We consider the dynamics of the quantum XY chain with disorder under the general assumption that the expectation of the eigenfunction correlator of the associated one-particle Hamiltonian satisfies a decay estimate typical of Anderson localization. We show that, starting from a broad class of product initial states, entanglement remains bounded for all times. For the XX chain, we also derive bounds on the particle transport which, in particular, show that the density profile of initial states that consist of fully occupied and empty intervals, only have significant dynamics near the edges of those intervals, uniformly for all times.