Entanglement evolution across defects in critical anisotropic Heisenberg chains

We study the out-of-equilibrium time evolution after a local quench connecting two anisotropic spin-1/2 XXZ Heisenberg open chains via an impurity bond. The dynamics is obtained by means of the adaptive time-dependent density-matrix renormalization group. We show that the entanglement entropies (von Neumann and Renyi) in the presence of a weakened bond depend on the sign of the bulk interaction. For an attractive interaction (Delta < 0), the defect turns out to be irrelevant and the evolution is asymptotically equivalent to the one without defect obtained by conformal field theory. For a repulsive interaction (Delta > 0), the defect is relevant and the entanglement saturates to a finite value. This out-of-equilibrium behavior generalizes the well-known results for the ground-state entanglement entropy of the model.