Area-Law Entanglement in Quantum Chaotic System

Abstract:Entanglement entropy is a fundamental diagnostic for quantum chaos, typically exhibiting volume-law scaling in highly excited eigenstates of chaotic many-body systems. In this work, we present a striking counterexample: a Floquet-driven quantum many-body system with Rydberg-like blockade that, despite being fully chaotic as indicated by its Wigner-Dyson level statistics and local thermalization, exhibits a strict area-law entanglement entropy. Specifically, the entanglement entropy of every Floquet eigenstate is bounded by $\ln2$, independent of system size. We trace this anomaly to the specific Hilbert space structure imposed by the blockades, which restricts the Schmidt rank across a bipartition. Furthermore, we generalize this discovery by establishing a duality between constrained many-body Hamiltonians and single-particle quantum walks on median graphs, and we outline a general procedure for constructing systems with an entanglement entropy bounded by a predetermined constant. Our results demonstrate that entanglement entropy alone is an insufficient diagnostic of many-body quantum chaos and highlight the profound impact of Hilbert space geometry on quantum dynamics and thermalization.

arXiv:2510.27511 [quant-ph]

(or arXiv:2510.27511v3 [quant-ph] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2510.27511 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite

Phys. Rev. E 114, 034203 (2026)

https://doi.org/10.1103/m9sq-j42t Focus to learn more DOI(s) linking to related resources

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