RIKEN Lunch Seminar

The entanglement entropy is a candidate of an entropy in Non-equilibrium physics and
recently, relaxation or thermalization is studied through the entanglement entropy with quamtum quenching, which is sudden change of parameter(s) in the Hamiltonian of the system.
Global quantum quench with a finite rate which crosses critical points is known to lead to universal scaling of correlation functions as functions of the quench rate. We explore scaling properties of the entanglement entropy of a subsystem of a scaler field on the lattice, harmonic chain, during a mass quench which asymptotes to finite constant values at early and late times and for which the dynamics is exactly solvable. Both for fast and slow quenches we find that the entanglement entropy has a constant term plus a term proportional to the subsystem size. For slow quenches, the constant piece is consistent with Kibble- Zurek predictions. Furthermore, the quench rate dependence of the extensive piece enters solely through the instantaneous correlation length at the Kibble-Zurek time, suggesting a new scaling hypothesis similar to that for correlation functions. This talk is based on arXiv:1702.04359.