Abstract: Understanding the dynamics in many-body quantum systems has proved to be a key to unlocking many fundamental questions in condensed matter, AMO, and high energy physics. Recent years have seen a range of tools being utilized to characterize many-body dynamics, from out-of-time-ordered correlation functions to spectral statistics. In this talk, we will discuss a new way to look at the problem from a quantum information perspective: we will study the multi-partite entanglement and mutual information associated with the time evolution operator of the dynamics. We will test this idea in a variety of systems, including the Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev model and 2D conformal field theories, and reveal a hierarchy of information scrambling ability of their dynamics. Furthermore, we will show that nature may have a bound on the amount of scrambled information in quantum evolutions, and illustrate how certain systems are prohibited from saturating the bound due to conservation laws. We will also discuss the relation and distinction between our entanglement measure and other probes of quantum dynamics.
The College of Arts