State dependent spread of entanglement in relatively local Hamiltonians

Abstract Relatively local Hamiltonians are a class of background independent non-local Hamiltonians from which local theories emerge within a set of short-range entangled states. The dimension, topology and geometry of the emergent local theory is determined by the initial state to which the Hamiltonian is applied. In this paper, we study dynamical properties of a simple relatively local Hamiltonian for N scalar fields in the large N limit. It is shown that the coordinate speeds at which entanglement spreads and local disturbance propagates in space strongly depend on state in the relatively local Hamiltonian.