Temporal Entanglement Transitions in the Periodically Driven Ising Chain
Oral-In-person
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.
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Publication: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.13970
Presenters
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Rishabh Jha
- University of Göttingen