Entanglement Dynamics in Harmonic Oscillator Chains

Abstract: We study the long-time evolution of the bipartite entanglement in translationally invariant gapped harmonic lattice systems with finite-range interactions. A lower bound for the von Neumann entropy is derived in terms of the purity of the reduced density matrix. It is shown that starting from an initially Gaussian state the entanglement entropy increases at least linearly in time. This implies that the dynamics of gapped (non-critical) harmonic lattice systems cannot be efficiently simulated by algorithms based on matrix-product decompositions of the quantum state.