Random quantum circuits yield minimally structured models for chaotic quantum dynamics, able to capture for example universal properties of entanglement growth. We provide exact results, and coarse-grained models, for the spreading of operators by quantum circuits made of Haar-random unitaries. We study both 1+1D and higher dimensions, and argue that the coarse-grained pictures carry over to operator spreading in generic many-body systems. In 1+1D, we demonstrate that the out-of-time-order correlator (OTOC) satisfies a biased diffusion equation, which gives exact results for the spatial profile of the OTOC, and determines the butterfly speed vB. We find that in 1+1D the 'front' of the OTOC broadens diffusively, with a width scaling in time as t 1/2 . We address fluctuations in the OTOC between different realizations of the random circuit, arguing that they are negligible in comparison to the broadening of the front within a realization. Turning to higher dimensions, we show that the averaged OTOC can be understood exactly via a remarkable correspondence with a purely classical droplet growth problem. This implies that the width of the front of the averaged OTOC scales as t 1/3 in 2+1D and as in 3+1D as t 0.240 (exponents of the Kardar-Parisi-Zhang universality class). We support our analytic argument with simulations in 2+1D. We point out that, in two or higher spatial dimensions, the shape of the spreading operator at late times is affected by underlying lattice symmetries, and is in general not spherical. However when full spatial rotational symmetry is present in 2+1D, our mapping implies an exact asymptotic form for the OTOC, in terms of the Tracy-Widom distribution.For an alternative perspective on the OTOC in 1+1D, we map it to the partition function of an Ising-like statistical mechanics model. As a result of special structure arising from unitarity, this partition function reduces to a random walk calculation which can be performed exactly. We also use this mapping to give exact results for entanglement growth in 1+1D circuits. arXiv:1705.08975v2 [cond-mat.str-el] 1 Sep 2017

Characterizing how entanglement grows with time in a many-body system, for example, after a quantum quench, is a key problem in nonequilibrium quantum physics. We study this problem for the case of random unitary dynamics, representing either Hamiltonian evolution with time-dependent noise or evolution by a random quantum circuit. Our results reveal a universal structure behind noisy entanglement growth, and also provide simple new heuristics for the "entanglement tsunami" in Hamiltonian systems without noise. In 1D, we show that noise causes the entanglement entropy across a cut to grow according to the celebrated KardarParisi-Zhang (KPZ) equation. The mean entanglement grows linearly in time, while fluctuations grow like ðtimeÞ 1=3 and are spatially correlated over a distance ∝ ðtimeÞ 2=3 . We derive KPZ universal behavior in three complementary ways, by mapping random entanglement growth to (i) a stochastic model of a growing surface, (ii) a "minimal cut" picture, reminiscent of the Ryu-Takayanagi formula in holography, and (iii) a hydrodynamic problem involving the dynamical spreading of operators. We demonstrate KPZ universality in 1D numerically using simulations of random unitary circuits. Importantly, the leading-order time dependence of the entropy is deterministic even in the presence of noise, allowing us to propose a simple coarse grained minimal cut picture for the entanglement growth of generic Hamiltonians, even without noise, in arbitrary dimensionality. We clarify the meaning of the "velocity" of entanglement growth in the 1D entanglement tsunami. We show that in higher dimensions, noisy entanglement evolution maps to the wellstudied problem of pinning of a membrane or domain wall by disorder.

We define dynamical universality classes for many-body systems whose unitary evolution is punctuated by projective measurements. In cases where such measurements occur randomly at a finite rate p for each degree of freedom, we show that the system has two dynamical phases: 'entangling' and 'disentangling'. The former occurs for p smaller than a critical rate pc, and is characterized by volume-law entanglement in the steady-state and 'ballistic' entanglement growth after a quench. By contrast, for p > pc the system can sustain only area-law entanglement. At p = pc the steady state is scale-invariant and, in 1+1D, the entanglement grows logarithmically after a quench.To obtain a simple heuristic picture for the entangling-disentangling transition, we first construct a toy model that describes the zeroth Rényi entropy in discrete time. We solve this model exactly by mapping it to an optimization problem in classical percolation.The generic entangling-disentangling transition can be diagnosed using the von Neumann entropy and higher Rényi entropies, and it shares many qualitative features with the toy problem. We study the generic transition numerically in quantum spin chains, and show that the phenomenology of the two phases is similar to that of the toy model, but with distinct 'quantum' critical exponents, which we calculate numerically in 1 + 1D.We examine two different cases for the unitary dynamics: Floquet dynamics for a nonintegrable Ising model, and random circuit dynamics. We obtain compatible universal properties in each case, indicating that the entangling-disentangling phase transition is generic for projectively measured many-body systems. We discuss the significance of this transition for numerical calculations of quantum observables in many-body systems.