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arXiv:1305.7244 · Physical Review Letters

Entanglement Tsunami: Universal Scaling in Holographic Thermalization

Hong Liu, Sunok Josephine Suh

Published Jan 7, 2014• 365 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

We consider the time evolution of entanglement entropy after a global quench in a strongly coupled holographic system, whose subsequent equilibration is described in the gravity dual by the gravitational collapse of a thin shell of matter resulting in a black hole. In the limit of large regions of entanglement, the evolution of entanglement entropy is controlled by the geometry around and inside the event horizon of the black hole, resulting in regimes of pre-local-equilibration quadratic growth (in time), post-local-equilibration linear growth, a late-time regime in which the evolution does not carry memory of the size and shape of the entangled region, and a saturation regime with critical behavior resembling those in continuous phase transitions. Collectively, these regimes suggest a picture of entanglement growth in which an "entanglement tsunami" carries entanglement inward from the boundary. We also make a conjecture on the maximal rate of entanglement growth in relativistic systems.

DOI
10.1103/physrevlett.112.011601

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We consider the time evolution of entanglement entropy after a global quench in a strongly coupled holographic system, whose subsequent equilibration is described in the gravity dual by the gravitational collapse of a thin shell of matter resulting in a black hole. In the limit of large regions of entanglement, the evolution of entanglement entropy is controlled by the geometry around and inside the event horizon of the black hole, resulting in regimes of pre-local-equilibration quadratic growth (in time), post-local-equilibration linear growth, a late-time regime in which the evolution does not carry memory of the size and shape of the entangled region, and a saturation regime with critical behavior resembling those in continuous phase transitions. Collectively, these regimes suggest a picture of entanglement growth in which an "entanglement tsunami" carries entanglement inward from the boundary. We also make a conjecture on the maximal rate of entanglement growth in relativistic systems.
We derive in detail several universal features in the time evolution of entanglement entropy and other nonlocal observables in quenched holographic systems. The quenches are such that a spatially uniform density of energy is injected at an instant in time, exciting a strongly coupled conformal field theory which eventually equilibrates. Such quench processes are described on the gravity side by the gravitational collapse of a thin shell that results in a black hole. Various nonlocal observables have a unified description in terms of the area of extremal surfaces of different dimensions. In the large distance limit, the evolution of an extremal surface, and thus the corresponding boundary observable, is controlled by the geometry around and inside the event horizon of the black hole, allowing us to identify regimes of pre-local-equilibration quadratic growth, post-local-equilibration linear growth, a memory loss regime, and a saturation regime with behavior resembling those in phase transitions. We also discuss possible bounds on the maximal rate of entanglement growth in relativistic systems.
We develop an analytic perturbative expansion to study the propagation of entanglement entropy for small subsystems after a global quench, in the context of the AdS/CFT\mathrm{AdS}/\mathrm{CFT}AdS/CFT correspondence. Opposite to the large interval limit, in this case the evolution of the system takes place at time scales that are shorter in comparison to the local equilibration scale and, thus, different physical mechanisms govern the dynamics and subsequent thermalization. In particular, we show that the heuristic picture in terms of an ``entanglement tsunami'' does not apply in this regime. We find two crucial differences: First, that the instantaneous rate of growth of the entanglement is not constrained by causality, but rather its time average and, second, that the approach to saturation is always continuous, regardless of the shape of the entangling surface. Our analytic expansion also enables us to verify some previous numerical results, namely, that the saturation time is nonmonotonic with respect to the chemical potential. All of our results are pertinent to CFTs with a classical gravity dual formulation.
In this paper, based on the fundamental principles of gauge/gravity duality and considering a global quench, we probe the physics of thermalization for certain special classes of strongly coupled nonrelativistic quantum field theories that are dual to an asymptotically Schr\"odinger DpDpDp brane space time. In our analysis, we note that during the prelocal stages of the thermal equilibrium the entanglement entropy has a faster growth in time compared to its relativistic cousin. However, it shows a linear growth during the postlocal stages of thermal equilibrium where the so-called tsunami velocity associated with the linear growth of the entanglement entropy saturates to that of its value corresponding to the relativistic scenario. Finally, we explore the saturation region and it turns out that one must constraint certain parameters of the theory in a specific way in order to have discontinuous transitions at the point of saturation.
We consider the time evolution of entanglement entropy after a global quench in a strongly coupled holographic two-dimensional system with initial temperature TiT_iTi​. Subsequent equilibration increases the temperature up to a final temperature TfT_fTf​. We describe this process holographically by an injection of a thin shell of matter in the black hole background with temperature TiT_iTi​. In the limit of large regions of entanglement, the evolution of entanglement entropy at large times becomes a function of one variable ΔS(τ,ℓ)∼M(τ−ℓ)\Delta S(\tau,\ell)\sim M(\tau-\ell)ΔS(τ,ℓ)∼M(τ−ℓ). This is a so called memory loss regime well known for the holographic thermalization from zero temperature. We evaluate specific characteristics of this regime in nonequilibrium heating and find that behaviour of the function $ M(\tau-\ell)$ during post-local-equilibration and saturation times has similar forms as for thermalization from zero temperature, but the scaling coefficients depend on the temperature difference Tf−TiT_f-T_iTf​−Ti​.
Abstract We study the holographic entanglement entropy evolution after a global sharp quench of thermal state. After the quench, the system comes to equilibrium and the temperature increases fromTitoTf. Holographic dual of this process is provided by an injection of a thin shell of matter in the black hole background. The quantitative characteristics of the evolution depend substantially on the size of the initial black hole. We show that characteristic regimes during non-equilibrium heating do not depend on the initial temperature and are the same as in thermalization. Namely these regimes are pre-local-equilibration quadratic growth, linear growth and saturation regimes of the time evolution of the holographic entanglement entropy. We study the initial temperature dependence of quantitative characteristics of these regimes and find that the critical exponents do not depend on the temperature, meanwhile the prefactors are the functions on the temperature.
Abstract: We discuss the behaviour of holographic entanglement entropy following a local quench in 2+1 dimensional strongly coupled CFTs. The entanglement generated by the quench propagates along an emergent light-cone, reminiscent of the Lieb-Robinson light-cone propagation of correlations in non-relativistic systems. We find the speed of propagation is bounded from below by the entanglement tsunami velocity obtained earlier for global quenches in holographic systems, and from above by the speed of light. The former is realized for sufficiently broad quenches, while the latter pertains for well localized quenches. The non-universal behavior in the intermediate regime appears to stem from finite-size effects. We also note that the entanglement entropy of subsystems reverts to the equilibrium value exponentially fast, in contrast to a much slower equilibration seen in certain spin models.