Multi-Region Entanglement in Locally Scrambled Quantum Dynamics

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new theoretical framework and ansatz to analyze multi-region entanglement dynamics in locally scrambled quantum systems, revealing how multi-region effects influence entanglement growth and butterfly velocity.

Contribution

The authors develop the entanglement feature formalism and a two-parameter MPS ansatz to systematically study multi-region entanglement evolution in quantum dynamics.

Findings

Multi-region entanglement can dominate single-region growth.

The entanglement velocity bound with butterfly velocity holds.

Multi-region effects vanish only in Haar random circuits.

Abstract

We study the evolution of multi-region bipartite entanglement entropy under locally scrambled quantum dynamics. We show that the multi-region entanglement can significantly modify the growth of single-region entanglement, whose effect has been largely overlooked in the existing literature. We developed a novel theoretical framework, called the entanglement feature formalism, to organize all the multi-region entanglement systematically as a sign-free many-body state. We further propose a two-parameter matrix product state (MPS) ansatz to efficiently capture the exponentially many multi-region entanglement features. Using these tools, we are able to study the multi-region entanglement dynamics jointly and represent the evolution in the MPS parameter space. By comparing the dynamical constraints on the motion of entanglement cuts, we are able to identify different quantum dynamics models in a unifying entanglement feature Hamiltonian. Depending on the quantum dynamics model, we find that multi-region effects can dominate the single region entanglement growth and only vanish for Haar random circuits. We calculate the operator-averaged out-of-time-order correlator based on the entanglement feature Hamiltonian and extract the butterfly velocity from the result. We show that the previously conjectured bound between the entanglement velocity and the butterfly velocity holds true even under the influence of multi-region entanglement. These developments could enable more efficient numerical simulations and more systematic theoretical understandings of the multi-region entanglement dynamics in quantum many-body systems.