Fig. 5: Jumps in entanglement following a quench from the vacuum state.

a–c Entanglement entropy S_E, number entropy S_N, and configurational entropy S_C, respectively [Eqs. (10)-(12)], for coupling strength J = 5 and system size N = 16. In each figure, we show the individual results for each of 1000 charge sectors (blue), as well as the mean (black solid) and median (black dotted) averages over sectors. The standard error in the mean is shaded in gray. Jumps in the configurational entropy are clearly visible across a wide range of time scales, spanning many orders of magnitude, with a single exemplary charge sector shown in (d). By taking the cumulative maximum \({\sup }_{\tau < {t}_{j}}S(\tau )\) of the entropy growth at discrete times t_j, thus approximating it as a series of steps (orange), we can calculate the heights and times τ_J of the jumps (red). e Histogram of jump times \(\left\{{\tau }_{J}\right\}\), weighted by jump height. A clear fit to a power law (orange dashed line) is observed, with \(P({\tau }_{J})\propto {\tau }_{J}^{-(\alpha +1)}\) and α = 0.019 ± 0.015.