Entanglement Membrane in Chaotic Many-Body Systems

Abstract

In certain analytically tractable quantum chaotic systems, the calculation of out-of-time-order correlation functions, entanglement entropies after a quench, and other related dynamical observables reduces to an effective theory of an “entanglement membrane” in spacetime. These tractable systems involve an average over random local unitaries defining the dynamical evolution. We show here how to make sense of this membrane in more realistic models, which do not involve an average over random unitaries. Our approach relies on introducing effective pairing degrees of freedom in spacetime, describing a pairing of forward and backward Feynman trajectories, inspired by the structure emerging in random unitary circuits. This viewpoint provides a framework for applying ideas of coarse graining to dynamical quantities in chaotic systems. We apply the approach to some translationally invariant Floquet spin chains studied in the literature. We show that a consistent line tension may be defined for the entanglement membrane and that there are qualitative differences in this tension between generic models and “dual-unitary” circuits. These results allow scaling pictures for out-of-time-order correlators and for entanglement to be taken over from random circuits to nonrandom Floquet models. We also provide an efficient numerical algorithm for determining the entanglement line tension in 1+1D.