Page-curve-like entanglement dynamics in open quantum systems

Abstract

The entanglement entropy of a black hole and that of its Hawking radiation are expected to follow the socalled Page curve: After an increase in line with Hawking’s calculation, it is expected to decrease back to zero once the black hole has fully evaporated, as demanded by unitarity. Recently, a simple system-plusbath model has been proposed which shows a similar behavior. Here, we make a general argument as to why such a Page-curve-like entanglement dynamics should be expected to hold generally for system-plusbath models at small coupling and low temperatures, when the system is initialized in a pure state far from equilibrium. The interaction with the bath will then generate entanglement entropy, but it eventually has to decrease to the value prescribed by the corresponding mean-force Gibbs state. Under those conditions, it is close to the system ground state. We illustrate this on two paradigmatic open-quantum-system models, the exactly solvable harmonic quantum Brownian motion and the spin-boson model, which we study numerically. In the first example we find that the intermediate entropy of an initially localized impurity is higher for more localized initial states. In the second example, for an impurity initialized in the excited state, the Page time—when the entropy reaches its maximum—occurs when the excitation has half decayed.