Ballistic Spreading of Entanglement in a Diffusive Nonintegrable System

Abstract

We study the time evolution of the entanglement entropy of a one-dimensional nonintegrable spin chain, starting from random nonentangled initial pure states. We use exact diagonalization of a nonintegrable quantum Ising chain with transverse and longitudinal fields to obtain the exact quantum dynamics. We show that the entanglement entropy increases linearly with time before finite-size saturation begins, demonstrating a ballistic spreading of the entanglement, while the energy transport in the same system is diffusive. Thus, we explicitly demonstrate that the spreading of entanglement is much faster than the energy diffusion in this nonintegrable system.