2020/04/30 by Ranjan Modak, Vincenzo Alba, Pasquale Calabrese
Computer Science · Physics and Astronomy · #Chaotic #Entropy (arrow of time) #Integrable system #Quantum #Quantum Information and Cryptography #Quantum chaos and dynamical systems #Quantum discord #Quantum entanglement #Quantum many-body systems #Scrambling #Squashed entanglement #cond-mat.quant-gas #cond-mat.stat-mech #cond-mat.str-el #hep-th #quant-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.1088/1742-5468/aba9d9
published as J. Stat. Mech. (2020) 083110 · 19 pages, 7 figures. Added two figures and one appendix. As published
openalex created_date 2020/04/24 · openalex publication_date 2020/08/01 · arxiv created 2020/08/29 · arxiv updated 2020/09/01 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
Abstract The entanglement evolution after a quantum quench became one of the tools to distinguish integrable versus chaotic (non-integrable) quantum many-body dynamics. Following this line of thoughts, here we propose that the revivals in the entanglement entropy provide a finite-size diagnostic benchmark for the purpose. Indeed, integrable models display periodic revivals manifested in a dip in the block entanglement entropy in a finite system. On the other hand, in chaotic systems, initial correlations get dispersed in the global degrees of freedom (information scrambling) and such a dip is suppressed. We show that while for integrable systems the height of the dip of the entanglement of an interval of fixed length decays as a power law with the total system size, upon breaking integrability a much faster decay is observed, signalling strong scrambling. Our results are checked by exact numerical techniques in free-fermion and free-boson theories, and by time-dependent density matrix renormalisation group in interacting integrable and chaotic models.