Abstract

Entanglement membrane theory is an effective coarse-grained description of entanglement dynamics and operator growth in chaotic quantum many-body systems. The fundamental quantity characterizing the membrane is the entanglement line tension. However, determining the entanglement line tension for microscopic models is in general exponentially difficult. We compute the entanglement line tension in a recently introduced class of exactly solvable yet chaotic unitary circuits, so-called generalized dual-unitary circuits, obtaining a non-trivial form that gives rise to a hierarchy of velocity scales with $v_E DU2 circuits, the entanglement line tension can be computed entirely, while for the higher levels the solvability is reduced to certain regions in spacetime. This partial solvability nevertheless constrains the dynamics inside the inaccessible region. Finally, we discuss a general framework of constructing lattice models with solvable dynamics. Our results shed light on entanglement membrane theory in microscopic Floquet lattice models and enable us to perform non-trivial checks on the validity of its predictions by comparison to exact and numerical calculations. Moreover, they demonstrate that generalized dual-unitary circuits display a more generic form of information dynamics than dual-unitary circuits.