Entangling Power: A Probe of Symmetry and Integrability in Quantum Many-Body Systems

Abstract

The entangling power of a unitary operator quantifies its ability to generate entanglement from product states and provides a natural probe of quantum many-body dynamics. Entanglement extremization at points of enhanced symmetry has previously been observed in high-energy scattering. In this work we compute the time-averaged entangling power of anisotropic Heisenberg spin chains across two-site models and finite-size systems, as well as the entangling power of the two-magnon $S$-matrix in the thermodynamic limit. For two-site models we establish a monotonic hierarchy: the entangling power decreases as the symmetry group grows, reaching its minimum at the $SU(2)$ XXX point. Finite-size XXZ chains exhibit sharp dips at the $SU(2)$ points $Δ=\pm 1$ and the free-fermion point $Δ=0$, with the free-fermion dip decaying much more slowly with system size. In the thermodynamic limit, we decompose the two-magnon $S$-matrix into quantum logic gates – Identity, SWAP, and $σ_z\otimesσ_z$ – and show that the entangling power vanishes for all scattering energies at the $SU(2)$ points, where the $S$-matrix reduces to the Identity gate, while the free-fermion point achieves the maximum – the opposite of the finite-size many-body behavior. The entangling power can serve as an operator diagnostic for symmetry and selected aspects of integrability in quantum simulations of spin-chain dynamics.