A De Bruijn Graph Formulation of Quantum Entanglement

Quantum entanglement is commonly characterized through global state descriptions on tensor product spaces, correlation measures or algebraic constructions, while local consistency constraints play no explicit structural role. We formulate entanglement as a combinatorial structure of overlapping local descriptions, drawing on De Bruijn graphs, where nodes represent overlapping contexts and paths encode globally coherent assemblies. We construct a graph whose nodes represent reduced quantum states on subsystems of fixed size and whose edges encode admissible extensions consistent with quantum mechanical compatibility conditions. Global many body states correspond to paths on this graph, while entanglement is reinterpreted as a property of graph connectivity and path multiplicity, rather than as a standalone numerical quantity. This formalism allows a separation between constraints imposed purely by local quantum consistency and additional structure introduced by dynamics, symmetries or boundary conditions, also clarifying how large-scale structural features may arise from local compatibility alone. Our graph-based formulation provides several advantages over conventional approaches. Supporting a unified treatment of static entanglement structure and dynamical evolution, it incorporates finite order locality and memory effects. Entanglement growth can be interpreted as path proliferation, while decoherence and noise correspond to the removal of admissible transitions. Our approach leads to testable hypotheses concerning the scaling of admissible state extensions, the robustness of entangled structures under local perturbations and the emergence of effective geometry from overlap constraints. Potential future directions include applications to many body reconstruction problems and comparative analysis of different classes of quantum states within a single combinatorial language.