A scalable method for measuring entanglement entropy of quantum many-body systems

Quantum many-body systems far from equilibrium are challenging to understand due to the spreading of quantum correlations among the constituents. Measuring the entanglement growth in such a system can serve to characterize the dynamical phases. We use high precision optical potentials in a quantum gas microscope to investigate quench dynamics and entanglement of a few-body bosonic system. The entanglement entropy is directly estimated by interfering two identically prepared copies of the same dynamical state, in a many-body extension of the two particle Hong-Ou-Mandel interference of bosons. This approach provides a versatile and scalable protocol for investigating the purity and entanglement growth of our system.