Non-Hermitian quantum many-body systems are attracting widespread interest for their exotic properties, including unconventional quantum criticality and topology. Here we study how quantum information and correlations spread under a quantum quench generated by a prototypical non-Hermitian spin chain. Using the mapping to fermions we solve exactly the problem and compute the entanglement entropy and the correlation dynamics in the thermodynamic limit. Depending on the quench parameters, we identify two dynamical phases. One is characterized by rapidly saturating entanglement and correlations. The other instead presents a logarithmic growth in time, and correlations spreading faster than the Lieb-Robinson bound, with collapses and revivals giving rise to a modulated light-cone structure. Here, in the long-time limit, we compute analytically the entanglement entropy that we show to scale logarithmically with the size of the cut, with an effective central charge that we obtain in closed form. Our results provide an example of an exactly solvable non-Hermitian many-body problem that shows rich physics including entanglement and spectral transitions.
We study the time evolution of the entanglement entropy of a one-dimensional nonintegrable spin chain, starting from random nonentangled initial pure states. We use exact diagonalization of a nonintegrable quantum Ising chain with transverse and longitudinal fields to obtain the exact quantum dynamics. We show that the entanglement entropy increases linearly with time before finite-size saturation begins, demonstrating a ballistic spreading of the entanglement, while the energy transport in the same system is diffusive. Thus we explicitly demonstrate that the spreading of entanglement is much …
Motivated by the findings of logarithmic spreading of entanglement in a many-body localized system, we more closely examine the spreading of entanglement in the fully many-body localized phase, where all many-body eigenstates are localized. Performing full diagonalizations of an XXZ spin model with random longitudinal fields, we identify two factors contributing to the spreading rate: the localization length ($ξ$), which depends on the disorder strength, and the final value of entanglement per spin ($s_\infty$), which primarily depends on the initial state. We find that the entanglement entrop…
The quasi-particle picture is a powerful tool to understand the entanglement spreading in many-body quantum systems after a quench. As an input, the structure of the excitations' pattern of the initial state must be provided, the common choice being pairwise-created excitations. However, several cases exile this simple assumption. In this work, we investigate weakly-interacting to free quenches in one dimension. This results in a far richer excitations' pattern where multiplets with a larger number of particles are excited. We generalize the quasi-particle ansatz to such a wide class of initia…
We study scrambling in connection to 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 afterwards. Entanglement saturates and becomes extensively multipartite, while scrambling continues its growth up to the recurrence time. Remarkably, the exponential behaviour of scrambling emerges not only in the chaotic case, but also in the regular one, when the dynamic…
These are lecture notes for a short course given at the Les Houches Summer School on ``Integrability in Atomic and Condensed Matter Physics'', in summer 2018. Here, I pedagogically discuss recent advances in the study of the entanglement spreading during the non-equilibrium dynamics of isolated integrable quantum systems. I first introduce the idea that the stationary thermodynamic entropy is the entanglement accumulated during the non-equilibrium dynamics and then join such an idea with the quasiparticle picture for the entanglement spreading to provide quantitive predictions for the time evo…
Understanding the spreading of the operator space entanglement entropy ($OSEE$) is key in order to explore out-of-equilibrium quantum many-body systems. Here we argue that for integrable models the dynamics of the $OSEE$ is related to the diffusion of the underlying quasiparticles. We derive the logarithmic bound $1/2\ln(t)$ for the $OSEE$ of some simple, i.e., low-rank, diagonal local operators. We numerically check that the bound is saturated in the rule $54$ chain, which is representative of interacting integrable systems. Remarkably, the same bound is saturated in the spin-1/2 Heisenberg $…
Quenched randomness can have a dramatic effect on the dynamics of isolated 1D quantum many-body systems, even for systems that thermalize. This is because transport, entanglement, and operator spreading can be hindered by `Griffiths' rare regions which locally resemble the many-body-localized phase and thus act as weak links. We propose coarse-grained models for entanglement growth and for the spreading of quantum operators in the presence of such weak links. We also examine entanglement growth across a single weak link numerically. We show that these weak links have a stronger effect on entan…
We study the time evolution of entanglement created by local or extended excitations upon the ground state of a free-fermion chain. A single particle or hole excitation produces a single bit of excess entropy for large times and subsystem lengths. In case of a double hole, some of the coherence between the excitations is preserved and the excess entropy becomes additive only for large hole separations. In contrast, the coherence is always lost for particle-hole excitations. Multiple hole excitations on a completely filled chain are also investigated. We find that for an extended contiguous hol…
We extend the semiclassical picture for the spreading of entanglement and correlations to quantum quenches with several species of quasiparticles that have non-trivial pair correlations in momentum space. These pair correlations are, for example, relevant in inhomogeneous lattice models with a periodically-modulated Hamiltonian parameter. We provide explicit predictions for the spreading of the entanglement entropy in the space-time scaling limit. We also predict the time evolution of one- and two-point functions of the order parameter for quenches within the ordered phase. We test all our pre…
The spreading of entanglement in out-of-equilibrium quantum systems is currently at the centre of intense interdisciplinary research efforts involving communities with interests ranging from holography to quantum information. Here we provide a constructive and mathematically rigorous method to compute the entanglement dynamics in a class of "maximally chaotic", periodically driven, quantum spin chains. Specifically, we consider the so called "self-dual" kicked Ising chains initialised in a class of separable states and devise a method to compute exactly the time evolution of the entanglement e…
Entanglement entropy is a powerful tool in characterizing universal features in quantum many-body systems. In quantum chaotic Hermitian systems, typical eigenstates have near maximal entanglement with very small fluctuations. Here, we show that for Hamiltonians displaying non-Hermitian many-body quantum chaos, modeled by the Ginibre ensemble, the entanglement entropy of typical eigenstates is greatly suppressed. The entropy does not grow with the Hilbert space dimension for sufficiently large systems and the fluctuations are of equal order. We derive the novel entanglement spectrum that has in…
We investigate the entanglement spreading in the anisotropic spin-1/2 Heisenberg (XXZ) chain after a geometric quench. This corresponds to a sudden change of the geometry of the chain or, in the equivalent language of interacting fermions confined in a box trap, to a sudden increase of the trap size. The entanglement dynamics after the quench is associated with the ballistic propagation of a magnetization wavefront. At the free fermion point (XX chain), the von-Neumann entropy S_A exhibits several intriguing dynamical regimes. Specifically, at short times a logarithmic increase is observed, si…
A quantum system subject to continuous measurement and post-selection evolves according to a non-Hermitian Hamiltonian. We show that, as one increases the rate of post-selection, this non-Hermitian Hamiltonian undergoes a spectral phase transition. On one side of this phase transition (for weak post-selection) an initially mixed density matrix remains mixed at all times, and an initially unentangled state develops volume-law entanglement; on the other side, an arbitrary initial state approaches a unique pure state with low entanglement. We identify this transition with an exceptional point in …
We consider a molecular dynamics method, the so-called flea gas for computing the evolution of entanglement after inhomogeneous quantum quenches in an integrable quantum system. In such systems the evolution of local observables is described at large space-time scales by the Generalized Hydrodynamics approach, which is based on the presence of stable, ballistically propagating quasiparticles. Recently it was shown that the GHD approach can be joined with the quasiparticle picture of entanglement evolution, providing results for entanglement growth after inhomogeneous quenches. Here we apply th…
Much has been learned about universal properties of the eigenstate entanglement entropy for one-dimensional lattice models, which is described by a Hermitian Hamiltonian. While very less of it has been understood for non-Hermitian systems. In the present work we study a non-Hermitian, non-interacting model of fermions which is invariant under combined $PT$ transformation. Our models show a phase transition from $PT$ unbroken phase to broken phase as we tune the hermiticity breaking parameter. Entanglement entropy of such systems can be defined in two different ways, depending on whether we con…
The past few years have witnessed the development of a comprehensive theory to describe integrable systems out of equilibrium, in which the Bethe ansatz formalism has been tailored to address specific problems arising in this context. While most of the work initially focused on the study of prototypical models such as the well-known Heisenberg chain, many theoretical results have been recently extended to a class of more complicated $\it{nested}$ integrable systems, displaying different species of quasiparticles. Still, in the simplest context of quantum quenches, the vast majority of theoreti…
Whether long-range interactions allow for a form of causality in non-relativistic quantum models remains an open question with far-reaching implications for the propagation of information and thermalization processes. Here, we study the out-of-equilibrium dynamics of the one-dimensional transverse Ising model with algebraic long-range exchange coupling. Using a state of the art tensor-network approach, complemented by analytic calculations and considering various observables, we show that a weak form of causality emerges, characterized by non-universal dynamical exponents. While the local spin…
We study the spreading of entanglement produced by the time evolution of a local fermionic excitation created above the ground state of the XXZ chain. The resulting entropy profiles are investigated via density-matrix renormalization group calculations, and compared to a quasiparticle ansatz. In particular, we assume that the entanglement is dominantly carried by spinon excitations traveling at different velocities, and the entropy profile is reproduced by a probabilistic expression involving the density fraction of the spinons reaching the subsystem. The ansatz works well in the gapless phase…
We study dynamics of quantum entanglement in smooth global quenches with a finite rate, by computing the time evolution of entanglement entropy in 1 + 1 dimensional free scalar theory with time-dependent masses which start from a nonzero value at early time and either crosses or approaches zero. The time-dependence is chosen so that the quantum dynamics is exactly solvable. If the quenches asymptotically approach a critical point at late time, the early-time and late-time entropies are proportional to the time and subsystem size respectively. Their proportionality coefficients are determined b…
We show that a class of $\mathcal{PT}$ symmetric non-Hermitian Hamiltonians realizing the Yang-Lee edge singularity exhibits an entanglement transition in the long-time steady state evolved under the Hamiltonian. Such a transition is induced by a level crossing triggered by the critical point associated with the Yang-Lee singularity and hence is first-order in nature. At the transition, the entanglement entropy of the steady state jumps discontinuously from a volume-law to an area-law scaling. We exemplify this mechanism using a one-dimensional transverse field Ising model with additional imag…
We present a general theory of quantum information propagation in chaotic quantum many-body systems. The generic expectation in such systems is that quantum information does not propagate in localized form; instead, it tends to spread out and scramble into a form that is inaccessible to local measurements. To characterize this spreading, we define an information speed via a quench-type experiment and derive a general formula for it as a function of the entanglement density of the initial state. As the entanglement density varies from zero to one, the information speed varies from the entanglem…
We study the spreading of quantum correlations and information in a one-dimensional quantum spin chain with critical disorder as encoded in an infinite randomness fixed point. Specifically, we focus on the dynamics after a quantum quench of the Rényi entropies, of the mutual information and of the entanglement negativity in the prototypical XXZ spin chain with random bonds and anisotropy parameters. We provide analytic predictions in the scaling regime based on real-space renormalization group methods. We support these findings through numerical simulations in the non-interacting limit, where …
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 gro…
Quantum phase transitions also occur in non-Hermitian systems. In this work we show that density functional theory, for the first time, uncovers universal behaviors for phase transitions in non-Hermitian many-body systems. To be specific, we first prove that the non-degenerate steady state of a non-Hermitian quantum many-body system is a universal function of the first derivative of the steady state energy with respect to the control parameter. This finding has far-reaching consequences for non-Hermitian systems: (i) It bridges the nonanalytic behavior in physical observable and nonanalytic be…
This work introduces a new class of robust states known as Exceptional Boundary (EB) states, which are distinct from the well-known topological and non-Hermitian skin boundary states. EB states occur in the presence of exceptional points, which are non-Hermitian critical points where eigenstates coalesce and fail to span the Hilbert space. This eigenspace defectiveness not only limits the accessibility of state information, but also interplays with long-range order to give rise to singular propagators only possible in non-Hermitian settings. Their resultant EB eigenstates are characterized by …
Understanding the spreading of quantum correlations in out-of-equilibrium many-body systems is one of the major challenges in physics. For {\it isolated} systems, a hydrodynamic theory explains the origin and spreading of entanglement via the propagation of quasi-particle pairs. However, when systems interact with their surrounding much less has been established. Here we show that the quasi-particle picture remains valid for open quantum systems: while information is still spread by quasiparticles, the environment modifies their correlation and introduces incoherent and mixing effects. For fre…
We study the time evolution of the logarithmic negativity after a global quantum quench. In a 1+1 dimensional conformal invariant field theory, we consider the negativity between two intervals which can be either adjacent or disjoint. We show that the negativity follows the quasi-particle interpretation for the spreading of entanglement. We check and generalise our findings with a systematic analysis of the negativity after a quantum quench in the harmonic chain, highlighting two peculiar lattice effects: the late birth and the sudden death of entanglement.
We characterize the growth and spreading of operators and entanglement in two paradigmatic non-thermalizing phases - the many-body localized phase and the random singlet phase - using out-of-time-ordered correlators, the entanglement contour, and operator entanglement. We contrast these phases with strongly thermalizing holographic conformal field theories and fully localized Anderson insulators. We obtain a phenomenological description of the operator and state dynamics of these phases and demonstrate the utility of the entanglement contour and operator entanglement measures as useful probes …
We study out of time order correlations, $C(x,t)$ and entanglement growth in the random field XX model with open boundary conditions using the exact Jordan-Wigner transformation to a fermionic Hamiltonian. For any non-zero strength of the random field this model describes an Anderson insulator. Two scenarios are considered: A global quench with the initial state corresponding to a product state of the Néel form, and the behaviour in a typical thermal state at $β=1$. As a result of the presence of disorder the information spreading as described by the out of time correlations stops beyond a typ…
Competing skin effect and quasiperiodic localization in the non-Hermitian Su-Schrieffer-Heeger chain: Reentrant delocalization, spectral topology destruction, and entanglement suppression
