Global quench dynamics and the growth of entanglement entropy in disordered spin chains with tunable range interactions

Youcef Mohdeb
J. Vahedi
R. N. Bhatt
S. Haas
S. Kettemann
October 18, 2023

Abstract

The nonequilibrium dynamics of disordered many-body quantum systems after a quantum quench unveils important insights about the competition between interactions and disorder, yielding, in particular, an interesting perspective toward the understanding of many-body localization. Still, the experimentally relevant effect of bond randomness in long-range interacting spin chains on their dynamical properties have so far not been investigated. In this Letter, we examine the entanglement entropy growth after a global quench in a quantum spin chain with randomly placed spins and long-range tunable interactions decaying with distance with power 𝛼. Using a dynamical version of the strong disorder renormalization group we find for 𝛼>𝛼𝑐 that the entanglement entropy grows logarithmically with time and becomes smaller with larger 𝛼 as 𝑆⁑(𝑑)=𝑆𝑝⁑ln⁑(𝑑)/(2⁒𝛼). Here, 𝑆𝑝=2⁒ln⁑2βˆ’1. We present results of numerical exact diagonalization calculations for system sizes up to π‘βˆΌ16 spins, in good agreement with the analytical results for sufficiently large 𝛼>π›Όπ‘β‰ˆ1.8. For 𝛼<𝛼𝑐, we find that the entanglement entropy grows as a power law with time, 𝑆⁑(𝑑)βˆΌπ‘‘π›Ύβ‘(𝛼) with 0<𝛾⁑(𝛼)<1 a decaying function of the interaction exponent 𝛼.