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arXiv:1201.3695 · Physical Review B

Entanglement entropy dynamics of disordered quantum spin chains

Ferenc Iglói, Zsolt Szatmári, Yu‐Cheng Lin

Published Mar 12, 2012• 88 citations
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Abstract

By means of free fermionic techniques we study the time evolution of the entanglement entropy $\mathcal{S}(t)$ of a block of spins in the random transverse-field Ising chain after a sudden change of the parameters of the Hamiltonian. We consider global quenches, when the parameters are modified uniformly in space, as well as local quenches, when two disconnected blocks are suddenly joined together. For a noncritical final state, the dynamical entanglement entropy is found to approach a finite limiting value for both types of quenches. If the quench is performed to the critical state, the entropy grows for an infinite block as $\mathcal{S}(t)\ensuremath{\sim}\mathrm{ln}\mathrm{ln}t$. This type of ultraslow increase is explained through the strong disorder renormalization group method.

DOI
10.1103/physrevb.85.094417

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By means of free fermionic techniques we study the time evolution of the entanglement entropy S(t)\mathcal{S}(t)S(t) of a block of spins in the random transverse-field Ising chain after a sudden change of the parameters of the Hamiltonian. We consider global quenches, when the parameters are modified uniformly in space, as well as local quenches, when two disconnected blocks are suddenly joined together. For a noncritical final state, the dynamical entanglement entropy is found to approach a finite limiting value for both types of quenches. If the quench is performed to the critical state, the entropy grows for an infinite block as S(t)\ensuremath∼lnlnt\mathcal{S}(t)\ensuremath{\sim}\mathrm{ln}\mathrm{ln}tS(t)\ensuremath∼lnlnt. This type of ultraslow increase is explained through the strong disorder renormalization group method.
The nonequilibrium dynamics of disordered many-body quantum systems after a quantum quench unveils important insights about the competition between interactions and disorder, yielding, in particular, an interesting perspective toward the understanding of many-body localization. Still, the experimentally relevant effect of bond randomness in long-range interacting spin chains on their dynamical properties have so far not been investigated. In this Letter, we examine the entanglement entropy growth after a global quench in a quantum spin chain with randomly placed spins and long-range tunable interactions decaying with distance with power $\ensuremath{\alpha}$. Using a dynamical version of the strong disorder renormalization group we find for $\ensuremath{\alpha}>{\ensuremath{\alpha}}_{c}$ that the entanglement entropy grows logarithmically with time and becomes smaller with larger $\ensuremath{\alpha}$ as $S(t)={S}_{p}ln(t)/(2\ensuremath{\alpha})$. Here, ${S}_{p}=2ln2\ensuremath{-}1$. We present results of numerical exact diagonalization calculations for system sizes up to $N\ensuremath{\sim}16$ spins, in good agreement with the analytical results for sufficiently large $\ensuremath{\alpha}>{\ensuremath{\alpha}}_{c}\ensuremath{\approx}1.8$. For $\ensuremath{\alpha}<{\ensuremath{\alpha}}_{c}$, we find that the entanglement entropy grows as a power law with time, $S(t)\ensuremath{\sim}{t}^{\ensuremath{\gamma}(\ensuremath{\alpha})}$ with $0<\ensuremath{\gamma}(\ensuremath{\alpha})<1$ a decaying function of the interaction exponent $\ensuremath{\alpha}$.
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We numerically investigate the growth of the entanglement entropy Sent(t){S}_{\mathrm{ent}}(t)Sent​(t) in time ttt, after a global quench from a product state, in quantum chains with various kinds of disorder. The main focus is, in particular, on fermionic chains with bond disorder. In the noninteracting case at criticality we numerically test recent predictions by the real-space renormalization group for the entanglement growth in time, the maximal entanglement as a function of block size, and the decay of a density-wave order parameter. We show that multiprecision calculations are required to reach the scaling regime and perform such calculations for specific cases. For interacting models with binary bond disorder we present data based on infinite-size density matrix renormalization group calculations and exact diagonalizations. We obtain numerical evidence of a many-body localized phase in bond-disordered systems where ${S}_{\mathrm{ent}}(t)\ensuremath{\sim}lnt$ seems to hold. Our results for bond disorder are contrasted with the well-studied case of potential disorder.
By means of free fermionic techniques combined with multiple precision arithmetic we study the time evolution of the average magnetization, , of the random transverse-field Ising chain after global quenches. We observe different relaxation behaviors for quenches starting from different initial states to the critical point. Starting from a fully ordered initial state, the relaxation is logarithmically slow described by , and in a finite sample of length L the average magnetization saturates at a size-dependent plateau here the two exponents satisfy the relation . Starting from a fully disordered initial state, the magnetization stays at zero for a period of time until with and then starts to increase until it saturates to an asymptotic value , with . For both quenching protocols, finite-size scaling is satisfied in terms of the scaled variable . Furthermore, the distribution of long-time limiting values of the magnetization shows that the typical and the average values scale differently and the average is governed by rare events. The non-equilibrium dynamical behavior of the magnetization is explained through semi-classical theory.
The nonequilibrium evolution of the block entanglement entropy is investigated in the XYXYXY chain in a transverse magnetic field after the Hamiltonian parameters are suddenly changed from and to arbitrary values. Using Toeplitz matrix representation and multidimensional phase methods, we provide analytic results for large blocks and for all times, showing explicitly the linear growth in time followed by saturation. The consequences of these analytic results are discussed and the effects of a finite block length is taken into account numerically.
Using a renormalization group approach, we solve the time evolution of random Ising spin chains with generic interactions starting from initial states of arbitrary energy. As a function of the Hamiltonian parameters, the system is tuned through a dynamical transition, similar to the ground-state critical point, at which the local spin correlations establish true long-range temporal order. In the state with a dominant transverse field, a spin that starts in an up state loses its orientation with time, while in the ``ordered'' state it never does. As in ground-state quantum phase transitions, the dynamical transition has unique signatures in the entanglement properties of the system. When the system is initialized in a product state, the entanglement entropy grows as log(t)\mathrm{log}(t)log(t) in the two ``phases,'' while at the critical point it grows as ${\mathrm{log}}^{\ensuremath{\alpha}}(t)$, with $\ensuremath{\alpha}$ a universal number. This universal entanglement growth requires generic (``integrability breaking'') interactions to be added to the pure transverse field Ising model.