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arXiv:1311.1200 · Physical review. D. Particles, fields, gravitation, and cosmology/Physical review. D. Particles and fields

Entanglement growth during thermalization in holographic systems

Hong Liu, Sunok Josephine Suh

Published Mar 19, 2014• 217 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

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.

DOI
10.1103/physrevd.89.066012

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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 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.
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.
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​.
We study thermalization in the holographic (1 + 1)-dimensional CFT after simultaneous generation of two high-energy excitations in the antipodal points on the circle. The holographic picture of such quantum quench is the creation of BTZ black hole from a collision of two massless particles. We perform holographic computation of entanglement entropy and mutual information in the boundary theory and analyze their evolution with time. We show that equilibration of the entanglement in the regions which contained one of the initial excitations is generally similar to that in other holographic quench models, but with some important distinctions. We observe that entanglement propagates along a sharp effective light cone from the points of initial excitations on the boundary. The characteristics of entanglement propagation in the global quench models such as entanglement velocity and the light cone velocity also have a meaning in the bilocal quench scenario. We also observe the loss of memory about the initial state during the equilibration process. We find that the memory loss reflects on the time behavior of the entanglement similarly to the global quench case, and it is related to the universal linear growth of entanglement, which comes from the interior of the forming black hole. We also analyze general two-point correlation functions in the framework of the geodesic approximation, focusing on the study of the late time behavior.
Growth of entanglement entropy in time-dependent states formed due to a global quench in holographic conformal field theories which admit an Einstein-Gauss-Bonnet dual gravity description is studied. The global quench in the bulk is modelled by an AdS-Vaidya solution with an electric charge. It is observed that the Gauss-Bonnet correction parameter leads to faster thermalization, and lower saturation entropy. The rate of growth also depends crucially on the correction, and may exceed 1 in general spacetime dimensions. Nevertheless, the growth still follows the universal pattern expected for relativistic CFTs. Additionally, a time-dependent analogue of relative entropy introduced in [1] is generalized to include correction from the Gauss-Bonnet parameter. We demonstrate our findings through concrete examples, including instantaneous, linear, and periodically driven quenches. We also briefly mention the evolution of mutual information.
Motivated by exploring the thermalization process in relativistic and nonrelativistic holographic field theories after a nonlocal quench, we investigate some features in the time evolution of the entanglement wedge cross section (EWCS). This quantity is a possible holographic dual to some nonlocal information measures such as entanglement of purification. In particular, we focus on the time dependence of the EWCS during black hole formation in (D+2D+2D+2)-dimensional anti--de Sitter spacetime as well as geometries with Lifshitz and hyperscaling-violating exponents. A combination of analytic and numerical results for large symmetric strip shaped boundary subregions shows that the scaling of the EWCS at early times only depends on the Lifshitz exponent. In addition, this early-growth regime is followed by a linear-growth regime whose velocity depends on the dimensions of spacetime, the Lifshitz exponent, and the hyperscaling parameter. This velocity is the same as the entanglement velocity and for nontrivial dynamical exponent depends on the temperature of the final equilibrium state.