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Spread of entanglement in a Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev chain

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  • Published: 25 September 2017
  • Volume 2017, article number 120, (2017)
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Spread of entanglement in a Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev chain
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  • Yingfei Gu1,
  • Andrew Lucas1 &
  • Xiao-Liang Qi1 

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  • 82 Citations

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A preprint version of the article is available at arXiv.

Abstract

We study the spread of Rényi entropy between two halves of a Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev (SYK) chain of Majorana fermions, prepared in a thermofield double (TFD) state. The SYK chain model is a model of chaotic many-body systems, which describes a one-dimensional lattice of Majorana fermions, with spatially local random quartic interaction. We find that for integer Rényi index n > 1, the Rényi entanglement entropy saturates at a parametrically smaller value than expected. This implies that the TFD state of the SYK chain does not rapidly thermalize, despite being maximally chaotic: instead, it rapidly approaches a prethermal state. We compare our results to the signatures of thermalization observed in other quenches in the SYK model, and to intuition from nearly-AdS2 gravity.

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  1. Department of Physics, Stanford University, 382 Via Pueblo Mall, Stanford, CA, U.S.A.

    Yingfei Gu, Andrew Lucas & Xiao-Liang Qi

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  1. Yingfei Gu
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Correspondence to Yingfei Gu.

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ArXiv ePrint: 1708.00871

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Cite this article

Gu, Y., Lucas, A. & Qi, XL. Spread of entanglement in a Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev chain. J. High Energ. Phys. 2017, 120 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/JHEP09(2017)120

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  • Received: 07 August 2017

  • Accepted: 14 September 2017

  • Published: 25 September 2017

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/JHEP09(2017)120

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Keywords

  • AdS-CFT Correspondence
  • Holography and condensed matter physics (AdS/CMT)
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