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arXiv:1806.00022 · Physical review. B./Physical review. B

Scrambling and entanglement spreading in long-range spin chains

Silvia Pappalardi, Angelo Russomanno, Bojan Žunkovič, Fernando Iemini, Alessandro Silva, Rosario Fazio

Published Oct 8, 2018• 193 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

We study scrambling in connection with multipartite entanglement dynamics in regular and chaotic long-range spin chains, characterized by a well-defined semi-classical limit. For regular dynamics, scrambling and entanglement dynamics are found to be very different: up to the Ehrenfest time, they rise side by side, departing only afterward. Entanglement saturates and becomes extensively multipartite, while scrambling, characterized by the dynamic of the square commutator of initially commuting variables, continues its growth up to the recurrence time. Remarkably, the exponential growth of the latter emerges not only in the chaotic case but also in the regular one, when the dynamics occurs at a dynamical critical point.

DOI
10.1103/physrevb.98.134303

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We study scrambling in connection with multipartite entanglement dynamics in regular and chaotic long-range spin chains, characterized by a well-defined semi-classical limit. For regular dynamics, scrambling and entanglement dynamics are found to be very different: up to the Ehrenfest time, they rise side by side, departing only afterward. Entanglement saturates and becomes extensively multipartite, while scrambling, characterized by the dynamic of the square commutator of initially commuting variables, continues its growth up to the recurrence time. Remarkably, the exponential growth of the latter emerges not only in the chaotic case but also in the regular one, when the dynamics occurs at a dynamical critical point.
Over the past twenty years, experimental and technological progresses have motivated a renewed attention to the study of non-equilibrium isolated many-body systems, leading to a relatively well-established paradigm in the case of local Hamiltonians. In the present thesis, I have used quantum information theoretical tools to study out-of-equilibrium dynamics, with particular attention on long-range interacting many-body systems. I have explored the dynamics of bipartite and multipartite entanglement in connection to chaos and scrambling in various long-range (clean and disordered) models. The results contained in this thesis contribute to establishing semi-classical tools as powerful techniques for the description of the quantum information spreading in long-range systems. I have further considered a different, yet connected question, concerning the multipartite entanglement structure of chaotic eigenstates and its generic evolution.
Operator scrambling is a crucial ingredient of quantum chaos. Specifically, in the quantum chaotic system, a simple operator can become increasingly complicated under unitary time evolution. This can be diagnosed by various measures such as square of the commutator (out-of-time-ordered correlator), operator entanglement entropy etc. In this paper, we discuss operator scrambling in three representative models: a chaotic spin-1/21/21/2 chain with spatially local interactions, a 2-local spin model and the quantum linear map. In the first two examples, although the speeds of scrambling are quite different, a simple Pauli spin operator can eventually approach a "highly entangled" operator with operator entanglement entropy taking a volume law value (close to the Page value). Meanwhile, the spectrum of the operator reduced density matrix develops a universal spectral correlation which can be characterized by the Wishart random matrix ensemble. In the second example, we further connect the 2-local model into a one dimensional chain and briefly discuss the operator scrambling there. In contrast, in the quantum linear map, although the square of commutator can increase exponentially with time, a simple operator does not scramble but performs chaotic motion in the operator basis space determined by the classical linear map. We show that once we modify the quantum linear map such that operator can mix in the operator basis, the operator entanglement entropy can grow and eventually saturate to its Page value, thus making it a truly quantum chaotic model.
Entanglement is a defining feature of many-body quantum systems and is an essential requirement for quantum computing. It is therefore useful to study physical processes which generate entanglement within a large system, as they maybe replicated for applications involving the said requirements in quantum information processing. A possible avenue to maximize entanglement generation is to rely on the phenomena of information scrambling, i.e. transport of initially localized information throughout the system. Here the rationale is that the spread of information carries with it an inherent capacity of entanglement generation. Scrambling greatly depends upon the dynamical nature of the system Hamiltonian, and the interplay between entanglement generation and information scrambling maybe investigated taking a chain of interacting spins on a one dimensional lattice. This system is analogous to an array of qubits and this relative simplicity implies that the resulting unitary dynamics can be efficiently simulated using present-day cloud based NISQ devices. In our present work, we consider such a spin model which is made up of nearest and next nearest neighbor XXZ Model, along with an introduced coupling term λ. This coupling term serves as a tuning parameter which modifies the dynamical nature of the system from the integrable to the quantum chaotic regime. In order to quantify the entanglement generated within the system we use the more general multipartite metric which computes the average entanglement across all system bipartitions to obtain a global picture of the entanglement structure within the entire system. Further to make our study initial state independent, we consider an ensemble of random initial states and evaluate the multipartite entanglement generated for each of these states under time evolution. We find clear differences in the entanglement measures as the system undergoes through different regimes. We also analyze the fluctuations present within our entanglement metric and find a distinct pattern as we head from the integrable to the chaotic regime.
Fast scrambling, quantified by the exponential initial growth of out-of-time-ordered correlators (OTOCs), is the ability to efficiently spread quantum correlations among the degrees of freedom of interacting systems and constitutes a characteristic signature of local unstable dynamics. As such, it may equally manifest both in systems displaying chaos or in integrable systems around criticality. Here we go beyond these extreme regimes with an exhaustive study of the interplay between local criticality and chaos right at the intricate phase-space region where the integrability-chaos transition first appears. We address systems with a well-defined classical (mean-field) limit, as coupled large spins and Bose-Hubbard chains, thus allowing for semiclassical analysis. Our aim is to investigate the dependence of the exponential growth of the OTOCs, defining the quantum Lyapunov exponent λ_{q} on quantities derived from the classical system with mixed phase space, specifically the local stability exponent of a fixed point λ_{loc} as well as the maximal Lyapunov exponent λ_{L} of the chaotic region around it. By extensive numerical simulations covering a wide range of parameters we give support to a conjectured linear dependence 2λ_{q}=aλ_{L}+bλ_{loc}, providing a simple route to characterize scrambling at the border between chaos and integrability.
The Ising spin chain with longitudinal and transverse magnetic fields is often used in studies of quantum chaos, displaying both chaotic and integrable regions in its parameter space. However, even at a strongly chaotic point this model does not exhibit Lyapunov growth of the commutator squared of spin operators, as this observable saturates before exponential growth can manifest itself (even in situations where a spatial suppression factor makes the initial commutator small). We extend this model from the spin 1/2 Ising model to higher spins, demonstrate numerically that a window of exponential growth opens up for sufficiently large spin, and extract a quantity which corresponds to a notion of a Lyapunov exponent. In the classical infinite-spin limit, we identify and compute the appropriate classical analog of the commutator squared, and show that the corresponding exponent agrees with the infinite-spin limit extracted from the quantum spin chain.
We study quantum information scrambling in spin models with both long-range all-to-all and short-range interactions. We argue that a simple global, spatially homogeneous interaction together with local chaotic dynamics is sufficient to give rise to fast scrambling, which describes the spread of quantum information over the entire system in a time that is logarithmic in the system size. This is illustrated in two tractable models: (1) a random circuit with Haar random local unitaries and a global interaction and (2) a classical model of globally coupled nonlinear oscillators. We use exact numerics to provide further evidence by studying the time evolution of an out-of-time-order correlator and entanglement entropy in spin chains of intermediate sizes. Our results pave the way towards experimental investigations of fast scrambling and aspects of quantum gravity with quantum simulators.