English

Entanglement Revivals and Scrambling for Evaporating Black Holes

High Energy Physics - Theory 2026-05-15 v2

Abstract

We investigate the spreading of entanglement, and entanglement memory effects, in two-dimensional conformal field theory (CFT) propagating on evaporating black hole backgrounds. Memory effects leading to late-time spikes in mutual information for widely separated intervals are well known in CFTs admitting a quasiparticle description. In this work we examine the effect of black hole scrambling on late time mutual information spikes for disjoint intervals in free fermion CFT prepared in a thermofield double state. Late-time entanglement revival is driven by island-induced purification of modes in the union of the intervals. We show across two distinct 2d gravity models, Jackiw-Teitelboim (JT) gravity and the Russo-Susskind-Thorlacius (RST) model, that parametrically dialing up black hole scrambling time smooths out and suppresses entanglement spikes until they disappear at a critical scale, interpolating between free quasiparticle and maximal scrambling pictures. At the critical point, the interval lengths are exponential in black hole scrambling time. We further find a very closely related effect manifest as an entanglement dip for a single interval in a single-sided evaporating RST black hole.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2604.26600,
  title  = {Entanglement Revivals and Scrambling for Evaporating Black Holes},
  author = {Levy B. N. Batista and Nicolò Bragagnolo and Rhys Holmes and S. Prem Kumar},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2604.26600},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

28 pages, 9 figures