High Energy Theory Seminar

I will present results on scaling regimes in entanglement growth during thermalization in holographic field theories. These scaling regimes are derived from the time evolution of entanglement entropy of spatial regions in a class of idealized thermalizing states in which a homogenous, isotropic density of energy is instantaneously injected into the vacuum of a CFT. The scaling formulae which apply before saturation only depend on macroscopic properties of the final equilibrium state as well the injected energy density and are expected to apply to a broad class of thermalizing states in strongly coupled field theories.

The time-dependent entanglement entropy is calculated using extremal surfaces in the gravity dual, and interestingly we find that ``critical extremal surfaces" inside the event horizon of the black hole, dual to the finite equilibrium state, result in regimes of linear growth and ``memory loss" for large regions at long time scales. We propose a picture of entanglement propagation in which a wave or ``entanglement tsunami" carries entanglement inward from the boundary of regions, and which captures universal linear growth as well as characteristics of saturation. We also conjecture some bounds on the rate of entanglement growth in relativistic systems.