Entanglement dynamics in harmonic-oscillator chains

We study the long-time evolution of the bipartite entanglement in translationally invariant one-dimensional harmonic lattice systems. We show that for Gaussian states, in quadratic interactions with periodic boundary conditions, there exists a lower bound for the von Neumann entropy which increases linearly in time. This implies that the dynamics of harmonic lattice systems can in general not efficiently be simulated by algorithms based on matrix-product decompositions of the quantum state, and interactions are needed to suppress the entanglement growth with time.