Understanding how complex entanglement structures emerge is a central problem in quantum many-body physics. Recent work by Zhang et al. [Phys. Rev. Lett. 137, 020404 (2026)] has considered structured initial states prepared by evolving a product state under a chaotic Hamiltonian for a finite time before quenching to the target Hamiltonian. In this setup, total entanglement entropy growth in many-body localized systems exhibits two distinct regimes, first increasing and then decreasing as the initial entanglement is tuned. In this work, we identify the physical origin of this behavior by analyzing the dynamics of both the Rényi entanglement entropy and the Wehrl-Rényi entropy in the random-field XXZ model, the latter of which characterizes multipartite entanglement. We show that a similar non-monotonic dependence on the initial entanglement also appears in the net growth of the Wehrl-Rényi entropy for product states polarized along the
z-direction. The first regime is governed by a finite magnetization associated with local integrals of motion, while the second reflects inter-site correlations. In contrast, for product states in the
x/y-direction, the entanglement growth exhibits a monotonic decay. Our results provide a more fine-grained picture of how distinct initial-state properties shape entanglement dynamics in many-body localized systems.
We prove rigorous bounds on the growth of $\ensuremath{\alpha}$-R\'enyi entropies ${S}_{\ensuremath{\alpha}}(t)$ (the von Neumann entropy being the special case $\ensuremath{\alpha}=1$) associated with any subsystem
A of a general lattice quantum many-body system with finite on-site Hilbert space dimension. For completely nonlocal Hamiltonians, we show that the instantaneous growth rates $|{S}_{\ensuremath{\alpha}}^{\ensuremath{'}}(t)|$ (with $\ensuremath{\alpha}\ensuremath{\ne}1$) can be exponentially larger than $|{S}_{1}^{\ensuremath{'}}(t)|$ as a function of the subsystem size
∣A∣. For
D-dimensional systems with geometric locality, we prove bounds on $|{S}_{\ensuremath{\alpha}}^{\ensuremath{'}}(t)|$ that depend on the decay rate of interactions with distance. When $\ensuremath{\alpha}=1$, the bound is
∣A∣ independent for all power-law decaying interactions $V(r)\ensuremath{\sim}{r}^{\ensuremath{-}w}$ with
w>2D+1. However, for $\ensuremath{\alpha}>1$, the bound is
∣A∣ independent only when the interactions are finite-range or decay faster than $V(r)\ensuremath{\sim}{e}^{\ensuremath{-}c\phantom{\rule{0.16em}{0ex}}{r}^{D}}$ for some
c depending on the local Hilbert space dimension. Using similar arguments, we also prove bounds on
k-local systems with or without geometric locality. A central theme of this work is that the value of $\ensuremath{\alpha}$ strongly influences the interplay between locality and instantaneous entanglement growth. In other words, the von Neumann entropy and the $\ensuremath{\alpha}$-R\'enyi entropies cannot be regarded as proxies for each other in studies of entanglement dynamics. We compare these bounds with analytic and numerical results on Hamiltonians with varying degrees of locality and find concrete examples that almost saturate the bound for nonlocal dynamics.
We introduce the concept of entanglement features of unitary gates, as a collection of exponentiated entanglement entropies over all bipartitions of input and output channels. We obtained the general formula for time-dependent
nth-R\'enyi entanglement features for unitary gates generated by random Hamiltonian. In particular, we propose an Ising formulation for the second R\'enyi entanglement features of random Hamiltonian dynamics, which admits a holographic tensor network interpretation. As a general description of entanglement properties, we show that the entanglement features can be applied to several dynamical measures of thermalization, including the out-of-time-order correlation and the entanglement growth after a quantum quench. We also analyze the Yoshida-Kitaev probabilistic protocol for random Hamiltonian dynamics.
It is now well-established that classical statistical mechanics emerges from the entanglement structure of quantum chaotic systems, as quantified by the (subsystem) eigenstate thermalization hypothesis (ETH). While this statement rests on the well-studied bipartite entanglement of the eigenstates of such systems, recent years have shown that many-body states are often characterized by multipartite entanglement, raising the question: what are the universal multipartite entanglement features of chaotic eigenstates? We answer this question in part by studying a tripartite generalization of the ergodic bipartition ansatz through the lens of two tripartite entanglement probes, the Rényi tripartite multi-entropy and the Rényi reflected entropy. We derive leading-order analytical expressions for the ensemble averages of both quantities using a saddle-point analysis. Beyond these measures, we obtain the average of the Rényi-2 reflected density matrix,
ρAA∗(2),which controls the Rényi-2 reflected entropy. We show that
ρAA∗(2) in a chaotic eigenstate is well-described by this ensemble average which, unlike an ordinary reduced density matrix, takes three qualitatively distinct forms across subsystem-size regimes, which may be viewed as a tripartite generalization of subsystem ETH. We benchmark our analytical predictions against exact diagonalization of the mixed-field Ising model.
We prove that the entanglement entropy of any pure initial state of a bipartite bosonic quantum system grows linearly in time with respect to the dynamics induced by any unstable quadratic Hamiltonian. The growth rate does not depend on the initial state and is equal to the sum of certain Lyapunov exponents of the corresponding classical dynamics. This paper generalizes the findings of [Bianchi et al., JHEP 2018, 25 (2018)], which proves the same result in the special case of Gaussian initial states. Our proof is based on a recent generalization of the strong subadditivity of the von Neumann entropy for bosonic quantum systems [De Palma et al., arXiv:2105.05627]. This technique allows us to extend our result to generic mixed initial states, with the squashed entanglement providing the right generalization of the entanglement entropy. We discuss several applications of our results to physical systems with (weakly) interacting Hamiltonians and periodically driven quantum systems, including certain quantum field theory models.
The dynamics of entanglement has recently been realized as a useful probe in studying ergodicity and its breakdown in quantum many-body systems. In this paper, we study theoretically the growth of entanglement in quantum many-body systems and propose a method to measure it experimentally. We show that entanglement growth is related to the spreading of local operators in real space. We present a simple toy model for ergodic systems in which linear spreading of operators results in a universal, linear-in-time growth of entanglement for initial product states, in contrast with the logarithmic growth of entanglement in many-body localized (MBL) systems. Furthermore, we show that entanglement growth is directly related to the decay of the Loschmidt echo in a composite system comprised of several copies of the original system, in which connections are controlled by a quantum switch (two-level system). By measuring only the switch's dynamics, the growth of the R\'enyi entropies can be extracted. Our work provides a way of understanding entanglement dynamics in many-body systems and to directly measure its growth in time via a single local measurement.