English

Logarithmic entanglement lightcone from eigenstate correlations in the many-body localised phase

Disordered Systems and Neural Networks 2025-06-03 v1 Quantum Gases Statistical Mechanics Quantum Physics

Abstract

We investigate the operator entanglement of the time-evolution operator through the framework of eigenstate correlations. Focusing on strongly disordered quantum many-body systems in the many-body localised (MBL) regime, we analyse the operator entanglement across various spatiotemporal cuts, revealing the logarithmic lightcone of entanglement spreading. We demonstrate that this logarithmic lightcone arises directly from a hierarchy of energyscales and lengthscales encoded in eigenstate correlations. By characterising the statistics of these hierarchical scales, we develop a microscopic theory for the spatiotemporal structure of entanglement spreading in MBL systems -- without invoking phenomenological constructs such as \ell-bits. This approach reveals the fundamental connection between eigenstate correlations and the emergent entanglement structure in MBL systems.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2504.02815,
  title  = {Logarithmic entanglement lightcone from eigenstate correlations in the many-body localised phase},
  author = {Ratul Thakur and Bikram Pain and Sthitadhi Roy},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2504.02815},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

12 pages, 8 figures

R2 v1 2026-06-28T22:45:40.463Z