Bridging entanglement dynamics and chaos in semiclassical systems

Abstract: It is widely recognized that entanglement generation and dynamical chaos are intimately related in semiclassical models via the process of decoherence. In this work, we propose a unifying framework which directly connects the bipartite and multipartite entanglement growth to the quantifiers of classical and quantum chaos. In the semiclassical regime, the dynamics of the von Neumann entanglement entropy, the spin squeezing, the quantum Fisher information and the out-of-time-order square commutator are governed by the divergence of nearby phase-space trajectories via the local Lyapunov spectrum, as suggested by previous conjectures in the literature. General analytical predictions are confirmed by detailed numerical calculations for two paradigmatic models, relevant in atomic and optical experiments, which exhibit a regular-to-chaotic transition: the quantum kicked top and the Dicke model.