Entanglement Suppression in Quantum Field Theories: Holography, Chaos, and Mixed-State Dynamics

TL;DR

The work investigates a regime where entanglement growth after a local quench is suppressed when a mixed-state background interacts with a pure-state excitation in holographic CFTs, a phenomenon tied to bulk black hole scattering. It proposes five interconnected research directions to generalize this mechanism to higher dimensions, connect it to quantum chaos via OTOCs, probe integrable limits, extend to entanglement negativity for mixed states, and recast suppression in terms of AdS scattering cross sections. The analysis reveals a deep link between scrambling dynamics and entanglement suppression, showing that integrable CFTs lack suppression while chaotic holographic theories exhibit rapid scrambling and entropy saturation with a boundary quantum-to-classical transition captured by negativity. These insights bridge non-equilibrium quantum information and gravitational dynamics, suggesting experimental avenues in quantum simulators and providing a concrete framework to quantify how spacetime geometry and information flow co-evolve in time-dependent backgrounds.

Abstract

Recent work has revealed that entanglement entropy growth in conformal field theories (CFTs) can be suppressed when a local operator quench interacts with a mixed-state excitation, providing a dual interpretation in terms of black hole scattering in AdS. This phenomenon, termed \emph{entanglement suppression}, opens several promising directions for exploration. In this proposal, I outline five distinct yet interconnected research trajectories: generalization to higher dimensions, the role of quantum chaos via out-of-time-order correlators (OTOCs), the absence of suppression in integrable models, the extension to entanglement negativity as a probe of mixedness, and a geometric interpretation based on scattering cross sections in AdS. Each direction offers new insights into the interplay between holography, non-equilibrium dynamics, and quantum information.