Entanglement Transition and Replica Wormhole in the Dissipative Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev Model

Abstract: Recent discoveries have highlighted the significance of replica wormholes in resolving the information paradox and establishing the unitarity of black hole evaporation. In this letter, we propose the dissipative Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev model (SYK) as a minimal quantum model that exhibits entanglement dynamics with features qualitatively similar to replica wormholes. As a demonstration, we investigate the entanglement growth of a pair of dissipative SYK models initialized in a thermofield double state (TFD). In the regime of large $N$ with weak dissipation, we observe a first-order entanglement transition characterized by a switch of the dominant saddle point: from replica diagonal solutions for short times to replica wormhole-like off-diagonal solutions for long times. Furthermore, we show that signature of replica wormholes persists even at moderate $N \lesssim 30$ by using the Monte Carlo quantum trajectory method. Our work paves the way for explorations of replica wormhole physics in quantum simulators.