Mutual information scrambling in an Ising spin chain

Investigating the scrambling of quantum information (also known as quantum chaos) in many-body quantum systems provides valuable insights into the postquench evolution of a system. While various methods are available to understand the chaotic dynamics of these quantum systems, scrambling of mutual information following a quench has recently also emerged as a diagnostic of chaotic dynamics. In this work, we consider a chain of spin-1/2 particles of a finite length L evolving with the mixed-field Ising Hamiltonian and impose open boundary conditions. We simulate the time evolution of entanglement entropy and mutual information following a quench from the Néel state in this system using tensor networks and find that the entanglement entropy for nonintegrable systems saturates to a constant value at late times, while it continues to oscillate for integrable systems. We also find that mutual information peaks as a function of distance between intervals decay faster for nonintegrable systems compared to integrable systems, in agreement with the results in literature for XXZ chains. We compare the oscillations in entanglement entropy evolution obtained from simulations in the integrable case with analytic results from the quasiparticle picture and find agreement.