Fine features of entanglement dynamics in quenches across the Ising quantum critical point

Abstract: The task of exploring and understanding important aspects of far-from-equilibrium dynamics of closed and generic quantum many-body systems has received a thrust of attention in recent years, driven partly by remarkable advances in ultracold experimental technologies. In this work, for the paradigmatic Ising spin chain with transverse and longitudinal fields, we present numerical observations of several "fine-grained" features of far-from-equilibrium dynamics from a quantum informational point of view that have hitherto escaped notice, induced by quantum quenches across the Ising critical point between states deep inside the para- and ferromagnetic regimes. Rather featureless dynamics is seen for ferromagnetic to paramagnetic quenches, but paramagnetic to ferromagnetic quenches exhibit rich behaviour, including a series of sudden deaths and revivals of entanglement between two spins in the system's bulk, periodic but short-lived occurrences of approximately $1-$uniform states and recurrences of an approximately Page-like dynamics of entanglement entropies of one- and two-spin subsystems, non-analytic cusps in single-copy entanglement entropy for sufficiently big subsystems, insufficient mixedness and a series of scrambling-$\textit{un}$scrambling of local information between neighboring spins. Moreover, essentially indistinguishable dynamics is seen at very early times between the integrable limit (zero longitudinal field) and non-integrable cases, with the former eventually showing signatures of better mixing and faster approach to equilibration than the latter. These features are expected to hold for quench dynamics across Ising quantum critical points in more complicated systems.