Emergent Spatial Structure and Entanglement Localization in Floquet Conformal Field Theory

Abstract

We study the energy and entanglement dynamics of (1+1)D conformal field theories (CFTs) under a Floquet drive with the sine-square deformed (SSD) Hamiltonian. Previous work has shown that this model supports both a nonheating and a heating phase. Here, we analytically establish several robust and “superuniversal” features of the heating phase which rely on conformal invariance but not on the details of the CFT involved. First, we show the energy density is concentrated in two peaks in real space, a chiral and an antichiral peak, which leads to an exponential growth in the total energy. The peak locations are set by fixed points of the Möbius transformation. Second, all of the quantum entanglement is shared between these two peaks. In each driving period, a number of Bell pairs are generated, with one member pumped to the chiral peak and the other member pumped to the antichiral peak. These Bell pairs are localized, accumulate at these two peaks, and can serve as a source of quantum entanglement. Third, in both the heating and nonheating phases, we find that the total energy is related to the half system entanglement entropy by a simple relation E(t)∝cexp[(6/c)S(t)] with c being the central charge. In addition, we show that the nonheating phase, in which the energy and entanglement oscillate in time, is unstable to small fluctuations of the driving frequency in contrast to the heating phase. Finally, we point out an analogy to the periodically driven harmonic oscillator which allows us to understand global features of the phases and introduce a quasiparticle picture to explain the spatial structure, which can be generalized to setups beyond the SSD construction.