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To implement arbitrary quantum circuits in architectures with restricted interactions, one may effectively simulate all-to-all connectivity by routing quantum information. We consider the entanglement dynamics and routing between two regions only connected through an intermediate “bottleneck” region with few qubits. In such systems, where the entanglement rate is restricted by a vertex boundary rather than an edge boundary of the underlying interaction graph, existing results such as the small incremental entangling theorem give only a trivial constant lower bound on the routing time (the minimum time to perform an arbitrary permutation). We significantly improve the lower bound on the routing time in systems with a vertex bottleneck. Specifically, for any system with two regions $L,R$ with $N_L,N_R$ qubits, respectively, coupled only through an intermediate region $C$ with $N_C$ qubits, for any $\delta >0$ we show a lower bound of $\mathrm{\Omega }(N_R^{1-\delta }/\sqrt{N_L}{N}_C)$ on the Hamiltonian quantum routing time when using piecewise time-independent Hamiltonians, or time-dependent Hamiltonians subject to a smoothness condition. We also prove an upper bound on the average amount of bipartite entanglement between $L$ and $C,R$ that can be generated in time $t$ by such architecture-respecting Hamiltonians in systems constrained by vertex bottlenecks, improving the scaling in the system size from $O\left(N_{L}t\right)$ to $O\left(\sqrt{N_L}t\right)$ . As a special case, when applied to the star graph (i.e., one vertex connected to $N$ leaves), we obtain an $\mathrm{\Omega }\left(\sqrt{N^{1-\delta }}\right)$ lower bound on the routing time and on the time to prepare $N/2$ Bell pairs between the vertices. We also show that, in systems of free particles, we can route optimally on the star graph in time $\mathrm{\Theta }\left(\sqrt{N}\right)$ using Hamiltonian quantum routing, obtaining a speedup over gate-based routing, which takes time $\mathrm{\Theta }\left(N\right)$ . 

By tightening the conventional Lieb-Robinson bounds to better handle systems that lack translation invariance, we determine the extent to which “weak links” suppress operator growth in disordered one dimensional spin chains. In particular, we prove that ballistic growth is impossible when the distribution of coupling strengths μ(J ) has a sufficiently heavy tail at small J and we identify the correct dynamical exponent to use instead. Furthermore, through a detailed analysis of the special case in which the couplings are genuinely random and independent, we find that the standard formulation of Lieb-Robinson bounds is insufficient to capture the complexity of the dynamics—we must distinguish between bounds that hold for all sites of the chain and bounds that hold for a subsequence of sites and we show by explicit example that these two can have dramatically different behaviors. All the same, our result for the dynamical exponent is tight, in that we prove by counterexample that there cannot exist any Lieb-Robinson bound with a smaller exponent. We close by discussing the implications of our results, both major and minor, for numerous applications ranging from quench dynamics to the structure of ground states.