No Arabic abstract
We consider the variation of von Neumann entropy of subsystem reduced states of general many- body lattice spin systems due to local quantum quenches. We obtain Lieb-Robinson-like bounds that are independent of the subsystem volume. The main assumptions are that the Hamiltonian satisfies a Lieb-Robinson bound and that the volume of spheres on the lattice grows at most exponentially with their radius. More specifically, the bound exponentially increases with time but exponentially decreases with the distance between the subsystem and the region where the quench takes place. The fact that the bound is independent of the subsystem volume leads to stronger constraints (than previously known) on the propagation of information throughout many-body systems. In particular, it shows that bipartite entanglement satisfies an effective light cone, regardless of system size. Further implications to t density-matrix renormalization-group simulations of quantum spin chains and limitations to the propagation of information are discussed.
Quantum entanglement and its main quantitative measures, the entanglement entropy and entanglement negativity, play a central role in many body physics. An interesting twist arises when the system considered has symmetries leading to conserved quantities: Recent studies introduced a way to define, represent in field theory, calculate for 1+1D conformal systems, and measure, the contribution of individual charge sectors to the entanglement measures between different parts of a system in its ground state. In this paper, we apply these ideas to the time evolution of the charge-resolved contributions to the entanglement entropy and negativity after a local quantum quench. We employ conformal field theory techniques and find that the known dependence of the total entanglement on time after a quench, $S_A sim log(t)$, results from $simsqrt{log(t)}$ significant charge sectors, each of which contributes $simsqrt{log(t)}$ to the entropy. We compare our calculation to numerical results obtained by the time-dependent density matrix renormalization group algorithm and exact solution in the noninteracting limit, finding good agreement between all these methods.
The time evolution of quantum many-body systems is one of the least understood frontiers of physics. The most curious feature of such dynamics is, generically, the growth of quantum entanglement with time to an amount proportional to the system size (volume law) even when the interactions are local. This phenomenon, unobserved to date, has great ramifications for fundamental issues such as thermalisation and black-hole formation, while its optimisation clearly has an impact on technology (e.g., for on-chip quantum networking). Here we use an integrated photonic chip to simulate the dynamics of a spin chain, a canonical many-body system. A digital approach is used to engineer the evolution so as to maximise the generation of entanglement. The resulting volume law growth of entanglement is certified by constructing a second chip, which simultaneously measures the entanglement between multiple distant pairs of simulated spins. This is the first experimental verification of the volume law and opens up the use of photonic circuits as a unique tool for the optimisation of quantum devices.
We study the time evolution of the logarithmic negativity after a global quantum quench. In a 1+1 dimensional conformal invariant field theory, we consider the negativity between two intervals which can be either adjacent or disjoint. We show that the negativity follows the quasi-particle interpretation for the spreading of entanglement. We check and generalise our findings with a systematic analysis of the negativity after a quantum quench in the harmonic chain, highlighting two peculiar lattice effects: the late birth and the sudden death of entanglement.
In this work we investigate the equilibration dynamics after a sudden Hamiltonian quench of a quantum spin system initially prepared in a thermal state. To characterize the equilibration we evaluate the Loschmidt echo, a global measure for the degree of distinguishability between the initial and time-evolved quenched states. We present general results valid for small quenches and detailed analysis of the quantum XY chain. The result is that quantum criticality manifests, even at small but finite temperatures, in a universal double-peaked form of the echo statistics and poor equilibration for sufficiently relevant perturbations. In addition, for this model we find a tight lower bound on the Loschmidt echo in terms of the purity of the initial state and the more-easily-evaluated Hilbert-Schmidt inner product between initial and time-evolved quenched states. This bound allows us to relate the time-averaged Loschmidt echo with the purity of the time-averaged state, a quantity that has been shown to provide an upper bound on the variance of observables.
We analyze fermions after an interaction quantum quench in one spatial dimension and study the growth of the steady state entanglement entropy density under either a spatial mode or particle bipartition. For integrable lattice models, we find excellent agreement between the increase of spatial and particle entanglement entropy, and for chaotic models, an examination of two further neighbor interaction strengths suggests similar correspondence. This result highlights the generality of the dynamical conversion of entanglement to thermodynamic entropy under time evolution that underlies our current framework of quantum statistical mechanics.