Abstract
The entangling power of a unitary operator quantifies its ability to generate entanglement from product states and provides a natural probe of quantum many-body dynamics. Entanglement extremization at points of enhanced symmetry has previously been observed in high-energy scattering. In this work we compute the time-averaged entangling power of anisotropic Heisenberg spin chains across two-site models and finite-size systems, as well as the entangling power of the two-magnon S-matrix in the thermodynamic limit. For two-site models we establish a monotonic hierarchy: the entangling power decreases as the symmetry group grows, reaching its minimum at the SU(2) XXX point. Finite-size XXZ chains exhibit sharp dips at the SU(2) points Δ=± 1 and the free-fermion point Δ=0, with the free-fermion dip decaying much more slowly with system size. In the thermodynamic limit, we decompose the two-magnon S-matrix into quantum logic gates -- Identity, SWAP, and σ_z⊗σ_z -- and show that the entangling power vanishes for all scattering energies at the SU(2) points, where the S-matrix reduces to the Identity gate, while the free-fermion point achieves the maximum -- the opposite of the finite-size many-body behavior. The entangling power can serve as an {\em operator} diagnostic for symmetry and selected aspects of integrability in quantum simulations of spin-chain dynamics.