Motivated by recent experiments in ultracold atomic gases that explore the nonequilibrium dynamics of interacting quantum many-body systems, we investigate the opposite limit of Landau's Fermi-liquid paradigm: We study a Hubbard model with a sudden interaction quench, that is, the interaction is switched on at time t=0. Using the flow equation method, we are able to study the real time dynamics for weak interaction U in a systematic expansion and find three clearly separated time regimes: (i) An initial buildup of correlations where the quasiparticles are formed. (ii) An intermediate quasi-steady regime resembling a zero temperature Fermi liquid with a nonequilibrium quasiparticle distribution function. (iii) The long-time limit described by a quantum Boltzmann equation leading to thermalization of the momentum distribution function with a temperature T proportional, variantU.
Motivated by recent experiments in ultracold atomic gases that explore the nonequilibrium dynamics of interacting quantum many-body systems, we investigate the opposite limit of Landau's Fermi-liquid paradigm: We study a Hubbard model with a sudden interaction quench, that is, the interaction is switched on at time t=0. Using the flow equation method, we are able to study the real time dynamics for weak interaction U in a systematic expansion and find three clearly separated time regimes: (i) An initial buildup of correlations where the quasiparticles are formed. (ii) An intermediate quasi-steady regime resembling a zero temperature Fermi liquid with a nonequilibrium quasiparticle distribution function. (iii) The long-time limit described by a quantum Boltzmann equation leading to thermalization of the momentum distribution function with a temperature T proportional, variantU.
The study of the interplay between interaction-induced correlations and nonequilibrium initial conditions in many-body systems has recently attracted a lot of attention. New experimental techniques provide high control over many-body systems and systematic access to their nonequilibrium regime. In many systems the nonequilibrium properties of a Fermi liquid can be relevant. A first approach to their understanding is the main content of this thesis. At the beginning, nonequilibrium phenomena, Landau's theory of a Fermi liquid, the Hubbard model, time evolution in quantum mechanics, related experiments, and the flow equation method are reviewed. The key observation of this thesis, namely a characteristic mismatch of expectation values in equilibrium and nonequilibrium, is first illustrated for the squeezed oscillator. For this one-particle model Hamiltonian the perturbative approach can be compared with the exact solution and it is shown that the mismatch holds even beyond perturbation theory. Afterwards these observations are generalized to a larger class of one-particle models. Then the nonequilibrium behavior of a Fermi liquid is examined by analyzing the Fermi liquid phase of the Hubbard model in more than one dimension. After a sudden switch-on of a weak two-particle interaction to the noninteracting Fermi gas the relaxation of the many-body system is observed. For this purpose, the flow equation transformation is implemented for the Hubbard Hamiltonian. Then the discussion of the momentum distribution function and of the kinetic energy displays a three-step relaxation behavior of the Fermi liquid from the initial perturbation until thermalization is reached. Firstly, the sudden switch inserts excitation energy into the system which drives the following dynamics. Then a rapid initial build-up of correlations is caused by initial dephasing and leads to the establishment of a quasiparticle picture. By that the system enters into a quasi-stationary state which can be long-lasting for weak interaction. This state shows prethermalization of the kinetic energy which already has relaxed to its final values. However, the momentum distribution still resembles a zero temperature Fermi liquid. Its later relaxation on a second time scale is caused by a residual two-particle interaction which allows for scattering processes and can be described by a quantum Boltzmann equation. The physical origin of this delayed relaxation can be traced back to an interplay of translational invariance of the Hubbard model and the Pauli principle for fermions; together they restrict the phase space for scattering events. Comparing with similar work I conjecture on the generic nature of the findings made for the quenched Fermi liquid in other many-body systems. Finally I point out to the potential relevance of the delayed relaxation for the observation of further nonequilibrium phenomena, for instance in BCS systems. In order to extend the study of sudden switching to arbitrary switching processes the calculation is repeated using the Keldysh perturbation theory. First evaluations for a linear increase of the interaction strength are given. Extensions of this work are suggested and may motivate further research.
The recent experimental implementation of condensed matter models in optical lattices has motivated research on their non-equilibrium behavior. Predictions about the dynamics of superconductors following a sudden quench of the pairing interaction have been made based on the effective Bardeen–Cooper–Schrieffer (BCS) Hamiltonian; however, their experimental verification requires the preparation of a suitable excited state of the Hubbard model along a twofold constraint: (i) a sufficiently non-adiabatic ramping scheme is essential to excite the non-equilibrium dynamics and (ii) overheating beyond the critical temperature of superconductivity must be avoided. For commonly discussed interaction ramps, there is no clear separation of the corresponding energy scales. Here we show that the matching of both conditions is simplified by the intrinsic relaxation behavior of ultracold fermionic systems: for the particular example of a linear ramp we examine the transient regime of prethermalization (Moeckel and Kehrein 2008 Phys. Rev. Lett. 100 175702) under the crossover from sudden to adiabatic switching using Keldysh perturbation theory. A real-time analysis of the momentum distribution exhibits a temporal separation of an early energy relaxation and its later thermalization by scattering events. For long but finite ramping times this separation can be large. In the prethermalization regime, the momentum distribution resembles a zero-temperature Fermi liquid as the energy inserted by the ramp remains located in high-energy modes. Thus ultracold fermions prove to be robust to heating, which simplifies the observation of non-equilibrium BCS dynamics in optical lattices.
We study the relaxation dynamics of a nonequilibrium Tomonaga-Luttinger model after a sudden interaction switch-on (``quench''), focusing on a double-step initial momentum distribution function. In the framework of the nonequilibrium bosonization, the results are obtained in terms of singular Fredholm determinants that are evaluated numerically and whose asymptotics are found analytically. While the quasiparticle weights decay exponentially with time after the quench, this is not a relaxation into a thermal state, in view of the integrability of the model. The steady-state distribution emerging at infinite times retains two edges which support Luttinger-liquid-like power-law singularities smeared by dephasing. The obtained critical exponents and the dephasing length are found to depend on the initial nonequilibrium state.
Motivated by recent experiments, we study the relaxation dynamics and thermalization in the one-dimensional Bose-Hubbard model induced by a global interaction quench. Specifically, we start from an initial state that has exactly one boson per site and is the ground state of a system with infinitely strong repulsive interactions at unit filling. Using exact diagonalization and the density-matrix renormalization-group method, we compute the time dependence of such observables as the multiple occupancy and the momentum distribution function. Typically, the relaxation to stationary values occurs over just a few tunneling times. The stationary values are identical to the so-called diagonal ensemble on the system sizes accessible to our numerical methods and we further observe that the microcanonical ensemble describes the time averages of many observables reasonably well for small and intermediate interaction strength. The expectation values of observables in the canonical ensemble agree quantitatively with the time averages obtained from the quench at small interaction strengths, and qualitatively provide a good description even in parameter regimes where the microcanonical ensemble is not applicable due to finite-size effects. We discuss our numerical results in the framework of the eigenstate thermalization hypothesis. Moreover, we also observe that the diagonal and the canonical ensembles are practically identical for our initial conditions already on the level of their respective energy distributions for small interaction strengths. Finally, we discuss implications of our results for the interpretation of a recent sudden expansion experiment [Phys. Rev. Lett. 110, 205301 (2013)], in which the same interaction quench was realized.
Recent advances in the tunability of ultracold atomic gases have created opportunities for studying interesting quantum many-body systems. Fano-Feshbach resonances, in particular, allow experimenters to freely adjust the scattering of atoms by controlling an external magnetic field. By rapidly changing this field near a resonance, it is possible to drive systems out of equilibrium towards novel quantum states where correlations between atoms change dynamically. In this thesis, we take a wave-function-based approach to theoretically examine the response of several interesting systems to suddenly-switched, or "quenched", interactions.\nWe first calculate the time evolution of a Bose-Einstein condensate that is quenched to the unitarity regime, where the scattering length 'a' diverges. Working within the time-dependent variational formalism, we find that the condensate does not deplete as quickly as the usual Bogoliubov theory would suggest. We also make a quantitative prediction for the dynamics of short-range pair correlations, encoded in Tan's contact. We then consider the dynamics of these correlations for quenches to small 'a', and we find that bound states can cause high-contrast oscillations of the contact. These dynamics can be modelled quantitatively at short times by using a properly-chosen two-body model. Finally, we characterize the nonlocal correlation waves that are generated by an interaction quench in arbitrary dimensionality. Our analysis demonstrates that the large-momentum limit of the post-quench momentum distribution can sometimes include contributions from both the short range and the long range, depending on the quench protocol.
Motivated by recent experiments on interacting cold atoms, we analyze interaction quenches in Luttinger liquids (LLs), where the interaction is ramped from zero to a finite value within a finite time. The fermionic single particle density matrix reveals several regions of spatial and temporal coordinates relative to the quench time, termed as Fermi liquid, sudden quench LL, adiabatic LL regime, and a LL regime with a time-dependent exponent. The various regimes can also be observed in the momentum distribution of the fermions, directly accessible through time of flight experiments. Most of our results apply to arbitrary quench protocols.