  We study the scaling of entanglement in low-energy states of quantum
many-body models on lattices of arbitrary dimensions. We allow for unbounded
Hamiltonians such that systems with bosonic degrees of freedom are included. We
show that if at low enough temperatures the specific heat capacity of the model
decays exponentially with inverse temperature, the entanglement in every
low-energy state satisfies an area law (with a logarithmic correction). This
behaviour of the heat capacity is typically observed in gapped systems.
Assuming merely that the low-temperature specific heat decays polynomially with
temperature, we find a subvolume scaling of entanglement. Our results give
experimentally verifiable conditions for area laws, show that they are a
generic property of low-energy states of matter, and, to the best of our
knowledge, constitute the first proof of an area law for unbounded Hamiltonians
beyond those that are integrable.
