Temporal Entanglement Transitions in the Periodically Driven Ising Chain

ORAL

Abstract

Periodically driven quantum systems can host non-equilibrium phenomena without static analogs, including in their entanglement dynamics. Here, we discover temporal entanglement transitions in a Floquet spin chain, which correspond to a quantum phase transition in the spectrum of the entanglement Hamiltonian and are signaled by dynamical spontaneous symmetry breaking. We show that these transitions are entanglement-driven, i.e., they require initially entangled states and remain invisible to conventional local observables. Intriguingly, we find these transitions across a broad range of driving frequencies (from adiabatic to high-frequency regime) and independently of drive details, where they manifest as periodic, sharp entanglement spectrum reorganizations marked by the Schmidt-gap closure, a vanishing entanglement echo, and symmetry-quantum-number flips. At high frequencies, the entanglement Hamiltonian acquires an intrinsic timescale decoupled from the drive period, rendering the transitions genuine steady-state features. Finite-size scaling reveals universal critical behavior with correlation-length exponent \nu=1, matching equilibrium Ising universality despite its emergence from purely dynamical mechanisms decoupled from static criticality. Our work establishes temporal entanglement transitions as novel features in Floquet quantum matter.

*K. G. and R. J. acknowledge financial support by Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) Grants No. 436382789, and No. 493420525, via large equipment grants (GOEGrid). This work is supported by the Office of Advanced Scientific Computing Research, Exploratory Research for Extreme Scale Science (EXPRESS) program, Office of Science of the U.S. Department of Energy under Award Number DE-SC0026216 (A. P.). This research was supported in part by grant NSF PHY-2309135 to the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics (KITP). A. P. thanks the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics (KITP) for its hospitality during the program on "Noise-robust Phases of Quantum Matter," during which part of this work was completed.

Publication: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.13970

Presenters

  • Rishabh Jha

    • University of Göttingen

Authors

  • Rishabh Jha

    • University of Göttingen
  • Karun Gadge

    • University of Göttingen
  • Abhinav Prem

    • Institute for Advanced Study (IAS)