Fate of entanglement in quadratic Markovian dissipative systems

Abstract: We develop a hydrodynamic description for the driven-dissipative dynamics of the entanglement negativity, which quantifies the genuine entanglement in mixed-state systems. We focus on quantum quenches in fermionic and bosonic systems subject to linear dissipation, as described by quadratic Lindblad master equations. In the spirit of hydrodynamics, we divide the system into mesoscopic cells. At early times, correlations are generated in each cell by the unitary component of the evolution. Correlations are then transported across different cells via ballistic quasiparticle propagation, while simultaneously evolving under the action of the environment. We show that in the hydrodynamic limit the negativity can be reconstructed from the correlations between the independently propagating quasiparticles. We benchmark our approach considering quenches from both homogeneous and inhomogeneous initial states in the Kitaev chain, the tight-binding chain, and the harmonic chain in the presence of gain/loss dissipation.