Local-to-Global Entanglement Dynamics by Periodically Driving Impurities

Abstract

We study the entanglement dynamics of one-dimensional fermionic chains subject to a local Floquet drive of a two-site impurity, and uncover a sharp transition in the entanglement dynamics set by the driving period $T$. For large periods, the entanglement entropy (EE) grows linearly in time, signaling a heating phase with volume-law entanglement; below a critical period $T_\ast$, the EE instead grows subextensively, characteristic of a local quantum quench. We establish this dichotomy in two complementary settings: a gapless nearest-neighbor hopping chain, where a single transition separates logarithmic from volume-law growth, and a gapped Su-Schrieffer-Heeger (SSH) chain, whose two-band structure yields a richer phase diagram with multiple area-to-volume-law transitions. In the noninteracting limit, we trace these transitions analytically to quasienergy folding in the single-particle Floquet spectrum: a single $π$-gap closure for the NN chain, and a sequence of foldings at both 0- and $π$-gaps for the SSH chain, yielding the alternating pattern of heating and non-heating phases. We further show that the so-called ``average energy" operator furnishes a many-body diagnostic of the transition, remaining local in the non-heating phase but developing non-local couplings in the heating phase. For the gapless chain, using extensive matrix-product-state simulations, we demonstrate that the non-heating phase and its subextensive entanglement growth survive weak interactions over numerically accessible timescales. Our results establish local Floquet engineering as a route to emergent bulk phenomena, offering a new perspective on energy localization and thermalization in driven many-body systems.