  The recognition that large classes of quantum many-body systems have limited
entanglement in the ground and low-lying excited states led to dramatic
advances in their numerical simulation via so-called tensor networks. However,
global dynamics elevates many particles into excited states, and can lead to
macroscopic entanglement and the failure of tensor networks. Here, we show that
for quantum transport -- one of the most important cases of this failure -- the
fundamental issue is the canonical basis in which the scenario is cast: When
particles flow through an interface, they scatter, generating a "bit" of
entanglement between spatial regions with each event. The frequency basis
naturally captures that -- in the long-time limit and in the absence of
inelastic scattering -- particles tend to flow from a state with one frequency
to a state of identical frequency. Recognizing this natural structure yields a
striking -- potentially exponential in some cases -- increase in simulation
efficiency, greatly extending the attainable spatial- and time-scales, and
broadening the scope of tensor network simulation to hitherto inaccessible
classes of non-equilibrium many-body problems.
