Quantum chaos and entanglement in ergodic and nonergodic systems.

Abstract

We study entanglement entropy (EE) as a signature of quantum chaos in ergodic and nonergodic systems. In particular we look at the quantum kicked top and kicked rotor as multispin systems and investigate the single-spin EE which characterizes bipartite entanglement of this spin with the rest of the system. We study the correspondence of the Kolmogorov-Sinai entropy of the classical kicked systems with the EE of their quantum counterparts. We find that EE is a signature of global chaos in ergodic systems and local chaos in nonergodic systems. In particular, we show that EE can be maximized even when systems are highly nonergodic, when the corresponding classical system is locally chaotic. In contrast, we find evidence that the quantum analog of Kolmogorov-Arnol'd-Moser (KAM) tori are tori of low entanglement entropy. We conjecture that entanglement should play an important role in any quantum KAM theory.