Journal
PROCEEDINGS OF THE NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
Volume 114, Issue 30, Pages 7947-7951Publisher
NATL ACAD SCIENCES
DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1703516114
Keywords
entanglement; quantum quench; integrability; thermodynamics
Categories
Funding
- European Research Council [279391 EDEQS]
- European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under Marie Sklodowoska-Curie Grant [702612 OEMBS]
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Entanglement and entropy are key concepts standing at the foundations of quantum and statistical mechanics. Recently, the study of quantum quenches revealed that these concepts are intricately intertwined. Although the unitary time evolution ensuing from a pure state maintains the system at zero entropy, local properties at long times are captured by a statistical ensemble with nonzero thermodynamic entropy, which is the entanglement accumulated during the dynamics. Therefore, understanding the entanglement evolution unveils how thermodynamics emerges in isolated systems. Alas, an exact computation of the entanglement dynamics was available so far only for noninteracting systems, whereas it was deemed unfeasible for interacting ones. Here, we show that the standard quasiparticle picture of the entanglement evolution, complemented with integrability-based knowledge of the steady state and its excitations, leads to a complete understanding of the entanglement dynamics in the space-time scaling limit. We thoroughly check our result for the paradigmatic Heisenberg chain.
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