Entanglement Growth from Entangled States: A Unified Perspective on Entanglement Generation and Transport.

Authors

Chun-Yue Zhang, Zi-Xiang Li, Shi-Xin Zhang

Published in

Physical review letters. Volume 137. Issue 2. Pages 020404. Jul 10, 2026.

Abstract

Studies of entanglement dynamics in quantum many-body systems have focused largely on initial product states. Here, we investigate the far richer dynamics from initial entangled states, uncovering universal patterns across diverse systems ranging from many-body localization (MBL) to random quantum circuits. Our central finding is that the growth of entanglement entropy can exhibit a counterintuitive nonmonotonic dependence on the initial entanglement in many nonergodic systems, peaking for moderately entangled initial states. To understand this phenomenon, we introduce a conceptual framework that decomposes entanglement growth into two mechanisms: "build" and "move." The "build" mechanism creates new entanglement, while the "move" mechanism redistributes preexisting entanglement throughout the system. Specifically, we demonstrate that MBL dynamics are "move-dominated," exhibiting a quantitative agreement with a random SWAP circuit that serves as a model of pure "move" dynamics by uniformly distributing preexisting entanglement. This implies that MBL acts as a redistributor of a hidden entanglement reservoir quantified by the bipartition-averaged entropy. This "build-move" framework offers a unified perspective for classifying diverse physical dynamics, deepening our understanding of entanglement propagation and information processing in quantum many-body systems.

PMID:
42503082
Bibliographic data and abstract were imported from PubMed on 26 Jul 2026.

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