Zeno crossovers in the entanglement speed of spin chains with noisy impurities

Abstract

We use a noisy signal with finite correlation time to drive a spin (dissipative impurity) in the quantum XY spin chain and calculate the dynamics of entanglement entropy (EE) of a bipartition of spins, for a stochastic quantum trajectory. We compute the noise averaged EE of a bipartition of spins and observe that its speed of spreading decreases at strong dissipation, as a result of the Zeno effect. We recover the Zeno crossover and show that noise averaged EE can be used as a proxy for the heating and Zeno regimes. Upon increasing the correlation time of the noise, the location of the Zeno crossover shifts at stronger dissipation, extending the heating regime. © 2022 IOP Publishing Ltd and SISSA Medialab srl.