Mr Hanzhi Jiang

A fruitful avenue in investigating out-of-equilibrium quantum many-body systems is to abruptly change their Hamiltonian and study the subsequent evolution of their quantum state. If this is done once, the setup is called a quench, while if it is done periodically, it is called Floquet driving. We consider the solvable setup of a two-dimensional CFT driven by Hamiltonians built out of conformal symmetry generators: in this case, the quantum dynamics can be understood using two-dimensional geometry. We investigate how the dynamics is reflected in the holographic dual three-dimensional spacetime and find new horizons. We argue that bulk operators behind the new horizons are reconstructable by virtue of modular flow.

The time evolution of entanglement entropy in generic chaotic many-body systems has an effective description in terms of a minimal membrane, characterised by a tension function. For 2d CFTs, a degenerate tension function reproduces several results regarding the dynamics of the entropy; this stands in contrast to higher dimensions where the tension is non-degenerate. In this paper we use holography to show that, in order to correctly capture the reflected entropy in 2d CFT, one needs to add an additional degree of freedom to the membrane description. Furthermore, we show that the conventional non-degenerate membrane tension function emerges upon introducing a relevant deformation of the CFT, dual to a planar BTZ black hole with scalar hair and with an interior Kasner universe. Finally, we also study the membrane description for reflected entropy and information velocity arXiv:1908.06993 in higher dimensions.

The quantum extremal island rule allows us to compute the Page curves of Hawking radiation in semi-classical gravity. In this work, we study the connection between these calculations and the thermalisation of chaotic quantum many-body systems, using a coarse-grained description of entanglement dynamics known as the entanglement membrane. Starting from a double-holographic model of eternal two-sided asymptotically AdS_d (d>2) black hole each coupled to a flat d-dimensional bath, we show that the entanglement dynamics in the late-time, large-subregion limit is described by entanglement membrane, thereby establishing a quantitative equivalence between a semi-classical gravity and a chaotic quantum many-body system calculation of the Page curve.

We study the real-time dynamics of multi-party entanglement signals in chaotic quantum many-body systems including but not necessarily restricted to holographic conformal field theories. We find that scrambling dynamics generates multiparty entanglement with rich structure including: (a) qualitatively different dynamical behaviours for different signals, likely reflecting different dynamics for different kinds of entanglement patterns, (b) discontinuities indicating dynamical phase transitions in the entanglement structure, (c) transient and non-monotonic multiparty entanglement, and (d) periods during which the extensive entanglement of some regions is entirely multipartite. Our main technical tool is the membrane theory of entanglement dynamics.

(1+1)d QFTs provide a tractable arena for understanding the emergence of hydrodynamics in thermal states. At high temperatures this process is governed by the weak breaking of conformal symmetry, and so in this limit many features of the hydrodynamic theory that emerges have been argued to be universal. In this paper we study aspects of the stress tensor thermal two-point function in holographic QFTs of this kind and show that they are consistent with the universal hydrodynamic theory proposed to apply at late times. Specifically, we identify the locations of the `pole skipping' points in momentum space at which there is an intersection of poles and zeroes of this two-point function in holographic QFTs. Although these points lie outside the regime where the hydrodynamic theory is controlled, we show that their locations are consistent with those found by resumming the hydrodynamic derivative expansion near the lightcone. For example, this resummation of the universal hydrodynamics correctly predicts the butterfly velocity of holographic theories.