  The trace over the degrees of freedom located in a subset of the space
transforms the vacuum state into a density matrix with non zero entropy. This
geometric entropy is believed to be deeply related to the entropy of black
holes. Indeed, previous calculations in the context of quantum field theory,
where the result is actually ultraviolet divergent, have shown that the
geometric entropy is proportional to the area for a very special type of
subsets. In this work we show that the area law follows in general from simple
considerations based on quantum mechanics and relativity. An essential
ingredient of our approach is the strong subadditive property of the quantum
mechanical entropy.
