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  • Open Access

Page curve and entanglement dynamics in an interacting fermionic chain

Rishabh Jha*, Salvatore R. Manmana, and Stefan Kehrein

  • *Contact author: rishabh.jha@uni-goettingen.de
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Phys. Rev. B 111, 235140 – Published 23 June, 2025

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/lt5c-pn14

Abstract

Generic nonequilibrium many-body systems display a linear growth of bipartite entanglement entropy in time, followed by a volume law saturation. In stark contrast, the Page curve dynamics of black-hole physics shows that the entropy peaks at the Page time tPage and then decreases to zero. Here, we investigate such Page-like behavior of the von Neumann entropy in a model of strongly correlated spinless fermions in a typical system-environment setup and characterize the properties of the Page curve dynamics in the presence of interactions using numerically exact matrix product states methods. The two phases of growth, namely, linear growth and bending down, are shown to be separated by a nonanalyticity in the min-entropy before tPage, which separates two different quantum phases, realized as the respective ground states of the corresponding entanglement (or equivalently, modular) Hamiltonian. We confirm and generalize, by introducing interactions, the findings of Phys. Rev. B 109, 224308 (2024) for a free spinless fermionic chain where the corresponding entanglement Hamiltonian undergoes a quantum phase transition at the point of nonanalyticity. However, in the presence of interactions, a scaling analysis gives a nonzero critical time for the nonanalyticity in the thermodynamic limit only for weak to intermediate interaction strengths, while the dynamics leading to the nonanalyticity becomes instantaneous for interactions large enough. We present a physical picture explaining these findings.

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Outline

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Phys. Rev. B 111, 235140– Published 23 June, 2025
  • Received 16 February 2025
  • Revised 21 May 2025
  • Accepted 11 June 2025
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Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article's title, journal citation, and DOI.

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