Entanglement Entropy Growth in Disordered Spin Chains with Tunable Range Interactions

Abstract: The non-equilibrium dynamics of disordered many-body quantum systems after a global quantum quench unveils important insights about the competition between interactions and disorder, yielding in particular an insightful perspective on many body localization (MBL). Still, the experimentally relevant effect of bond randomness in long-range interacting spin chains on the quantum quench dynamics have so far not been investigated. In this letter, we examine the entanglement entropy growth after a global quench in a quantum spin chain with randomly placed spins and long-range tunable interactions decaying with distance with power $\alpha$. Using a dynamical version of the strong disorder renormalization group (SDRG) we find for $\alpha >\alpha_c$ that the entanglement entropy grows logarithmically with time and becomes smaller with larger $\alpha$ as $S(t) = S_p \ln(t)/(2\alpha)$. Here, $S_p= 2 \ln2 -1$. We use numerical exact diagonalization (ED) simulations to verify our results for system sizes up to $ N\sim 16$ spins, yielding good agreement for sufficiently large $\alpha > \alpha_c \approx 1.8$. For $\alpha<\alpha_c$, we find that the entanglement entropy grows as a power-law with time, $S(t)\sim t^{\gamma(\alpha)}$ with $0<\gamma(\alpha)<1$ a decaying function of the interaction exponent $\alpha$.