Spacetime picture for entanglement generation in noisy fermion chains

Abstract: Studies of random unitary circuits have shown that the calculation of Renyi entropies of entanglement can be mapped to classical statistical mechanics problems in spacetime. In this paper, we develop an analogous spacetime picture of entanglement generation for random free or weakly interacting fermion systems without conservation laws. We first study a free-fermion model, namely a 1D chain of Majorana modes with nearest neighbour hoppings, random in both space and time. We analyze the Nth Renyi entropy of entanglement using a replica formalism, and we show that the effective model is equivalent to an SO(2N) Heisenberg spin chain evolving in imaginary time. By applying a saddle-point approximation to the coherent states path integral for the N = 2 case, we arrive at a semiclassical picture for the dynamics of the entanglement purity, in terms of two classical fields in spacetime. The classical solutions involve a smooth domain wall that interpolates between two values, with this domain wall relaxing diffusively in the time direction. We then study how adding weak interactions to the free-fermion model modifies this spacetime picture, reflecting a crossover from diffusive to ballistic spreading of information.