Entanglement generation and scaling from noisy quenches across a quantum critical point

We study the impact of noise on the dynamics of entanglement in the transverse-field Ising chain, with the field quenched linearly across one or both of the quantum critical points of the model. Taking concurrence as a measure of entanglement, we find that a quench generates entanglement between nearest- and next-nearest-neighbor spins, with noise reducing the amount of entanglement. Focusing on the next-nearest-neighbor concurrence, known to exhibit Kibble-Zurek scaling with the square root of the quench rate in the noiseless case, we find a different result when noise is present: The concurrence now scales logarithmically with the quench rate, with a noise-dependent amplitude. This is also different from the “anti-Kibble-Zurek” scaling of defect density with quench rate when noise is present, suggesting that noisy entanglement generation is largely independent of the rate of defect formation. Intriguingly, the critical timescale beyond which no entanglement is produced by a noisy quench scales as a power law with the strength of noise, with the same exponent as that which governs the optimal quench time for which defect formation is at a minimum in a standard quantum annealing scheme.