We study the dynamical generation of entanglement as a signature of chaos in a system of periodically kicked coupled tops, where chaos and entanglement arise from the same physical mechanism. The long-time-averaged entanglement as a function of the position of an initially localized wave packet very closely correlates with the classical phase space surface of section—it is nearly uniform in the chaotic sea, and reproduces the detailed structure of the regular islands. The uniform value in the chaotic sea is explained by the random state conjecture. As classically chaotic dynamics take localized distributions in phase space to random distributions, quantized versions take localized coherent states to pseudorandom states in Hilbert space. Such random states are highly entangled, with an average value near that of the maximally entangled state. For a map with global chaos, we derive that value based on analytic results for the entropy of random states. For a mixed phase space, we use the Percival conjecture to identify a “chaotic subspace” of the Hilbert space. The typical entanglement, averaged over the unitarily invariant Haar measure in this subspace, agrees with the long-time-averaged entanglement for initial states in the chaotic sea. In all cases the dynamically generated entanglement is that of a random complex vector, even though the system is time-reversal invariant, and the Floquet operator is a member of the circular orthogonal ensemble.

• Received 9 April 2008

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevE.78.046211