Lieb-Robinson Bounds on Entanglement Gaps from Symmetry-Protected Topology

A quantum quench is the simplest protocol to investigate nonequilibrium many-body quantum dynamics. Previous studies on the entanglement properties of quenched quantum many-body systems mainly focus on the growth of entanglement entropy. Several rigorous results and phenomenological guiding principles have been established, such as the no-faster-than-linear entanglement growth generated by generic local Hamiltonians and the peculiar logarithmic growth for many-body localized systems. However, little is known about the dynamical behavior of the full entanglement spectrum, which is a refined character closely related to the topological nature of the wave function. Here, we establish a rigorous and universal result for the entanglement spectra of 1D SPT systems evolving out of equilibrium. Our result is derived both for free-fermion SPT systems and interacting ones. For free-fermion systems with AZ symmetries, we prove that the single-particle entanglement gap after quenches obeys essentially the same Lieb-Robinson bound as that on the equal-time correlation, provided that there is no dynamical symmetry breaking. As a notable byproduct, we obtain a new type of Lieb-Robinson velocity which is related to the band dispersion with a complex wave number and reaches the minimum as the maximal (relative) group velocity. Within the framework of tensor networks, i.e., for SPT MPSs evolved by symmetric and trivial MPUs, we also identify a Lieb-Robinson bound on the many-body entanglement gap for general quenched interacting SPT systems. This result suggests high potential of tensor-network approaches for exploring rigorous results on long-time quantum dynamics. Influence of partial symmetry breaking, effects of disorder, and the relaxation property in the long-time limit are also discussed. Our work establishes a paradigm for exploring rigorous results of SPT systems out of equilibrium.