Entanglement revivals and scrambling for evaporating black holes

Batista, Levy B. N., Bragagnolo, Nicolò, Holmes, Rhys and Kumar, S. Prem 2026. Entanglement revivals and scrambling for evaporating black holes. Physical Review D (particles, fields, gravitation, and cosmology) 114 , 046005. 10.1103/z1j3-zq5g

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Abstract

We investigate the spreading of entanglement, and entanglement memory effects, in two-dimensional conformal field theory (CFT) propagating on evaporating black hole backgrounds. Memory effects leading to late-time spikes in mutual information for widely separated intervals are well known in CFTs admitting a quasiparticle description. In this work we examine the effect of black hole scrambling on late time mutual information spikes for disjoint intervals in free fermion CFT prepared in a thermofield double state. Late-time entanglement revival is driven by island-induced purification of modes in the union of the intervals. We show across two distinct 2D gravity models, Jackiw-Teitelboim (JT) gravity and the Russo-Susskind-Thorlacius (RST) model, that parametrically dialing up black hole scrambling time smooths out and suppresses entanglement spikes until they disappear at a critical scale, interpolating between free quasiparticle and maximal scrambling pictures. At the critical point, the interval lengths are exponential in black hole scrambling time. We further find a very closely related effect manifest as an entanglement dip for a single interval in a single-sided evaporating RST black hole.

Item Type:	Article
Date Type:	Published Online
Status:	Published
Schools:	Schools > Physics and Astronomy Schools > Physical, Chemical & Environmental Sciences
Publisher:	American Physical Society
ISSN:	2470-0010
Date of First Compliant Deposit:	18 September 2026
Date of Acceptance:	14 July 2026
Last Modified:	18 Sep 2026 14:15
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/189710

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