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arXiv:1006.0927 · Physical Review B

Relaxation dynamics of an exactly solvable electron-phonon model

Dante Marvin Kennes, V. Meden

Published Aug 12, 2010• 23 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

We address the question whether observables of an exactly solvable model of electrons coupled to (optical) phonons relax into large time stationary state values and investigate if the asymptotic expectation values can be computed using a stationary density matrix. Two initial nonequilibrium situations are considered. A sudden quench of the electron-phonon coupling, starting from the noninteracting canonical equilibrium at temperature $T$ in the electron as well as in the phonon subsystems, leads to a rather simple dynamics. A richer time evolution emerges if the initial state is taken as the product of the phonon vacuum and the filled Fermi sea supplemented by a highly excited additional electron. Our model has a natural set of constants of motion, with as many elements as degrees of freedom. In accordance with earlier studies of such type of models, we find that expectation values which become stationary can be described by the density matrix of a generalized Gibbs ensemble which differs from that of a canonical ensemble. For the model at hand, it appears to be evident that the eigenmode occupancy operators should be used in the construction of the stationary density matrix.

DOI
10.1103/physrevb.82.085109

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We address the question whether observables of an exactly solvable model of electrons coupled to (optical) phonons relax into large time stationary state values and investigate if the asymptotic expectation values can be computed using a stationary density matrix. Two initial nonequilibrium situations are considered. A sudden quench of the electron-phonon coupling, starting from the noninteracting canonical equilibrium at temperature TTT in the electron as well as in the phonon subsystems, leads to a rather simple dynamics. A richer time evolution emerges if the initial state is taken as the product of the phonon vacuum and the filled Fermi sea supplemented by a highly excited additional electron. Our model has a natural set of constants of motion, with as many elements as degrees of freedom. In accordance with earlier studies of such type of models, we find that expectation values which become stationary can be described by the density matrix of a generalized Gibbs ensemble which differs from that of a canonical ensemble. For the model at hand, it appears to be evident that the eigenmode occupancy operators should be used in the construction of the stationary density matrix.
We present a one-dimensional microscopic model of interacting electrons coupled to phonons that allows the exact calculation of the time evolution of the momentum distribution functions starting from a nonequilibrium initial state. The model shows relaxation features known from approximate calculations for more realistic three-dimensional models. The exact results are compared with approximate ones resulting from the use of quantum kinetic equations which avoid the assumption of completed successive scattering processes implicit in simple Boltzmann equations. To renormalize the electronic but not the phonon propagation in the non-Markovian equations yields no improvement uniform in time compared to simpler approximations. Due to the presence of the Fermi sea only the additional renormalization of the phonon propagation leads to a drastic improvement in comparison with the exact results.
We analyze the thermalization of a photoexcited charge carrier coupled to a single branch of quantum phonons within the Holstein model. To this end, we calculate the far-from-equilibrium time evolution of a pure many-body state and compare it with predictions of the thermal Gibbs ensemble. We show that at strong enough carrier excitation, the nonequilibrium system evolves towards a thermal steady state. Our analysis is based on two classes of observables. First, the occupations of fermionic momenta, which are the eigenvalues of the one-particle density matrix, match in the steady state the values in the corresponding Gibbs ensemble. This indicates thermalization of static fermionic correlations on the entire lattice. Second, the dynamic current-current correlations, including the time-resolved optical conductivity, also take the form of their thermal counterparts. Remarkably, both static and dynamic fermionic correlations thermalize with identical temperatures. Our results suggest that the subsequent relaxation processes, observed in time-resolved ultrafast spectroscopy, may be efficiently described by applying quasithermal approaches, e.g., multitemperature models.
We study nonequilibrium dynamics of integrable and nonintegrable closed quantum systems whose unitary evolution is interrupted with stochastic resets, characterized by a reset rate rrr, that project the system to its initial state. We show that the steady-state density matrix of a nonintegrable system, averaged over the reset distribution, retains its off-diagonal elements for any finite rrr. Consequently a generic observable $\stackrel{\ifmmode \hat{}\else \^{}\fi{}}{O}$, whose expectation value receives a contribution from these off-diagonal elements, never thermalizes under such dynamics for any finite rrr. We demonstrate this phenomenon by exact numerical studies of experimentally realizable models of ultracold bosonic atoms in a tilted optical lattice. For integrable Dirac-like fermionic models driven periodically between such resets, the reset-averaged steady state is found to be described by a family of generalized Gibbs ensembles characterized by rrr. We also study the spread of particle density of a noninteracting one-dimensional fermionic chain, starting from an initial state where all fermions occupy the left half of the sample, while the right half is empty. When driven by resetting dynamics, the density profile approaches at long times to a nonequilibrium stationary profile that we compute exactly. We suggest concrete experiments that can possibly test our theory.
Motivated by recent experiments, we investigate the Lieb-Liniger gas initially prepared in an out-of-equilibrium state that is Gaussian in terms of the phonons, namely whose density matrix is the exponential of an operator quadratic in terms of phonon creation and annihilation operators. Because the phonons are not exact eigenstates of the Hamiltonian, the gas relaxes to a stationary state at very long times whose phonon population is a priori different from the initial one. Thanks to integrability, that stationary state needs not be a thermal state. Using the Bethe-ansatz mapping between the exact eigenstates of the Lieb-Liniger Hamiltonian and those of a noninteracting Fermi gas and bosonization techniques we completely characterize the stationary state of the gas after relaxation and compute its phonon population distribution. We apply our results to the case where the initial state is an excited coherent state for a single phonon mode, and we compare them to exact results obtained in the hard-core limit.
We obtain the exact time evolution for the one-dimensional integrable fermionic 1/r1/r1/r Hubbard model after a sudden change of its interaction parameter, starting from either a metallic or a Mott-insulating eigenstate. In all cases the system relaxes to a new steady state, showing that the presence of the Mott gap does not inhibit relaxation. The properties of the final state are described by a generalized Gibbs ensemble. We discuss under which conditions such ensembles provide the correct statistical description of isolated integrable systems in general. We find that generalized Gibbs ensembles do predict the properties of the steady state correctly, provided that the observables or initial states are sufficiently uncorrelated in terms of the constants of motion.
A general form of a many-body Hamiltonian is considered, which includes an interacting fermionic subsystem coupled to noninteracting extended fermionic and bosonic systems. We show that the exact dynamics of the extended bosonic system can be derived from the reduced density matrix of the subsystem alone, despite the fact that the latter contains information about the subsystem only. The advantage of the formalism is immediately clear: While the reduced density matrix of the subsystem is readily available, the formalism offers access to observables contained in the full density matrix, which is often difficult to obtain. As an example, we consider an extended Holstein model and study the nonequilibrium dynamics of the so-called ``reaction mode'' for different model parameters. The effects of the phonon frequency, the strength of the electron-phonon couplings, and the source-drain bias voltage on the phonon dynamics across the bistability are discussed.