In the numerical simulation, we work directly on the interacting fermionic Hamiltonian, equation (
31), at half filling in momentum space by the exact diagonalization (ED). The time-evolved wavefunction ∣$\Psi$(
t)〉 is obtained by the standard time-dependent Lanczos method [
24]. The reduced density matrix
ρA(
t) with respect to ∣$\Psi$(
t)〉 and the consequent entanglement spectrum are procured accordingly, after tracing out the
q < 0 part in the momentum space. The results for the quench of (Δ
0 = − 0.2) → (Δ = 0.4) on various lattice sizes (
N = 18, 22, 26, 30) are presented in figure
1. In the main figure, the logarithms of both ${\left|\langle 0| {\rm{\Psi }}(t)\rangle \right|}^{2}$ and the largest entanglement eigenvalue ${P}_{\max }(t)$ are shown. The inset displays a comparison with that of ${\left|\langle {\mathrm{GS}}_{0}| {\rm{\Psi }}(t)\rangle \right|}^{2}$ for
N= 30. Here following the previous conventions, ∣0〉 is the noninteracting GS (at Δ = 0), and ∣GS
0〉 is the GS at Δ
0. The quench takes place at
t = 0, with ∣$\Psi$(0)〉 = ∣GS
0〉. For a given
N the agreement between ${P}_{\max }(t)$ and ${\left|\langle 0| {\rm{\Psi }}(t)\rangle \right|}^{2}$ holds well during the time evolution. On the other hand, the deviation from ${\left|\langle {\mathrm{GS}}_{0}| {\rm{\Psi }}(t)\rangle \right|}^{2}$ is evident, as shown in the inset of figure
1. It indicates it is ${P}_{\max }^{(2)}$ in
HB, rather than ${P}_{\max }^{(1)}$, that is compatible with ${P}_{\max }$ which we have calculated in
HF. Recall that
P(2) is about the momentum-space entanglement in terms of
b operators. Additionally, we observe that following a rapid decrease in the early stage, the later-time oscillation of these time-dependent quantities, which is due to the discreteness of the energy spectrum in finite systems, is evidently suppressed with increasing lattice size. We note that the short transient time before saturation taking place is around 4
J−1 from the numerical results, consistent with the estimation from the effective field theory [
18].