Entanglement Growth from Structured Initial States in Many-Body Localized Systems

TL;DR

This paper investigates how initial state properties influence entanglement growth in many-body localized systems, revealing non-monotonic behavior linked to local integrals of motion and inter-site correlations.

Contribution

It provides a detailed analysis of entanglement dynamics from structured initial states, highlighting the physical origins of non-monotonic growth in MBL systems.

Findings

Non-monotonic entanglement growth depends on initial state polarization.

Finite magnetization governs initial entanglement regime.

Inter-site correlations dominate later entanglement dynamics.

Abstract

Understanding how complex entanglement structures emerge is a central problem in quantum many-body physics. Recent work by Zhang et al. 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 R\'enyi entanglement entropy and the Wehrl-R\'enyi 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-R\'enyi 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.