Entanglement Growth from Entangled States: A Unified Perspective on Entanglement Generation and Transport

Abstract

Studies of entanglement dynamics in quantum many-body systems have focused largely on initial product states. Here, we investigate the far richer dynamics from initial entangled states, uncovering universal patterns across diverse systems ranging from many-body localization (MBL) to random quantum circuits. Our central finding is that the growth of entanglement entropy can exhibit a counter-intuitive non-monotonic dependence on the initial entanglement in many non-ergodic systems, peaking for moderately entangled initial states. To understand this phenomenon, we introduce a conceptual framework that decomposes entanglement growth into two mechanisms: ``build'' and ``move''. The ``build'' mechanism creates new entanglement, while the ``move'' mechanism redistributes pre-existing entanglement throughout the system. Specifically, we demonstrate that MBL dynamics are ``move-dominated'', exhibiting a quantitative agreement with a random SWAP circuit that serves as a model of pure ``move'' dynamics by uniformly distributing pre-existing entanglement. This implies that MBL acts as a redistributor of a hidden entanglement reservoir quantified by the bipartition-averaged entropy. This ``build-move'' framework offers a unified perspective for classifying diverse physical dynamics, deepening our understanding of entanglement propagation and information processing in quantum many-body systems.

8 pages, 3 figures, 16 figures in Supplementary Material

References in corpus (44)

• Thermalization and its mechanism for generic isolated quantum systems
• Many body localization and thermalization in quantum statistical mechanics
• Entanglement detection
• Anderson Transitions
• Localization of interacting fermions at high temperature
• Direct observation of Anderson localization of matter-waves in a controlled disorder
• The distribution of the ratio of consecutive level spacings in random matrix ensembles
• Many body localization in Heisenberg XXZ magnet in a random field
• Phenomenology of fully many-body-localized systems
• Many-body localization in periodically driven systems
• Random Quantum Circuits
• Spectral signatures of many-body localization with interacting photons
• Entanglement Phase Transition Induced by the Non-Hermitian Skin Effect
• Interferometric probes of many-body localization
• Challenges to observation of many-body localization
• Many-Body Localization in the Age of Classical Computing
• Operator entanglement entropy of the time evolution operator in chaotic systems
• Characterizing Many-Body Localization by Out-of-Time-Ordered Correlation
• Entanglement spreading in a many-body localized system
• From Anderson localization on Random Regular Graphs to Many-Body localization
• Quantum revivals and many-body localization
• Purification and many-body localization in cold atomic gases
• Symmetry restoration and quantum Mpemba effect in symmetric random circuits
• Many-body localization in infinite chains
• Critical properties of the Anderson localization transition and the high dimensional limit
• Exact convergence times for generation of random bipartite entanglement
• Signatures of many-body localisation in the dynamics of two-sites entanglement
• Logarithmic Entanglement Lightcone in Many-Body Localized Systems
• Universal KPZ scaling in noisy hybrid quantum circuits
• Entanglement Structure and Information Protection in Noisy Hybrid Quantum Circuits
• Noise-induced phase transitions in hybrid quantum circuits
• Symmetry restoration and quantum Mpemba effect in many-body localization systems
• Average pure-state entanglement entropy in spin systems with SU(2) symmetry
• Multi-Region Entanglement in Locally Scrambled Quantum Dynamics
• Subsystem Information Capacity in Random Circuits and Hamiltonian Dynamics
• Numerical instability of non-Hermitian Hamiltonian evolutions
• Entanglement dynamics in U(1) symmetric hybrid quantum automaton circuits
• Skin Effect Induced Anomalous Dynamics from Charge-Fluctuating Initial States
• Symmetry breaking in chaotic many-body quantum systems at finite temperature
• The dynamical $\alpha$-Rényi entropies of local Hamiltonians grow at most linearly in time
• Persistent Ballistic Entanglement Spreading with Optimal Control in Quantum Spin Chains
• Entanglement growth and information capacity in a quasiperiodic system with a single-particle mobility edge
• Logarithmic light cone, slow entanglement growth, and quantum memory
• Tensor Cross Interpolation of Purities in Quantum Many-Body Systems