Spread of entanglement for small subsystems in holographic CFTs

We develop an analytic perturbative expansion to study the propagation of entanglement entropy for small subsystems after a global quench, in the context of the AdS/CFT correspondence. Opposite to the large interval limit, in this case the evolution of the system takes place at time scales that are shorter in comparison to the local equilibration scale and, thus, different physical mechanisms govern the dynamics and subsequent thermalization. In particular, we show that the heuristic picture in terms of an “entanglement tsunami” does not apply in this regime. We find two crucial differences: First, that the instantaneous rate of growth of the entanglement is not constrained by causality, but rather its time average and, second, that the approach to saturation is always continuous, regardless of the shape of the entangling surface. Our analytic expansion also enables us to verify some previous numerical results, namely, that the saturation time is nonmonotonic with respect to the chemical potential. All of our results are pertinent to CFTs with a classical gravity dual formulation.