We study the evolution of a system of free fermions in one dimension under the simultaneous effects of coherent tunneling and stochastic Markovian noise. We identify a class of noise terms where a hierarchy of decoupled equations for the correlation functions emerges. In the special case of incoherent, nearest-neighbour hopping the equation for the two-point functions is solved explicitly. The Green's function for the particle density is obtained analytically and a timescale is identified where a crossover from ballistic to diffusive behaviour takes place. The result can be interpreted as a competition between the two types of conduction channels where diffusion dominates on large timescales.
We study the evolution of a system of free fermions in one dimension under the simultaneous effects of coherent tunneling and stochastic Markovian noise. We identify a class of noise terms where a hierarchy of decoupled equations for the correlation functions emerges. In the special case of incoherent, nearest-neighbour hopping the equation for the two-point functions is solved explicitly. The Green's function for the particle density is obtained analytically and a timescale is identified where a crossover from ballistic to diffusive behaviour takes place. The result can be interpreted as a competition between the two types of conduction channels where diffusion dominates on large timescales.
Charge and energy are expected to diffuse in interacting systems of fermions at finite temperatures, even in the absence of disorder, with the interactions inducing a crossover from the coherent and ballistic streaming of quasi-particles at early times, to incoherent diffusive behavior at late times. The relevant crossover timescales and the transport coefficients are both controlled by the strength of interactions. In this work we develop a numerical method to simulate such systems at high temperatures, applicable in a wide range of interaction strengths, by adapting Dissipation-assisted Operator Evolution (DAOE) to fermions. Our fermion DAOE, which approximates the exact dynamics by systematically discarding information from high n-point functions, is tailored to capture non-interacting dynamics exactly, thus providing a good starting point for the weakly interacting problem. Applying our method to a microscopic model of weakly interacting fermions, we numerically demonstrate that the crossover from ballistic to diffusive transport happens at a time tD∼1/Δ2 and that the diffusion constant similarly scales as D∼1/Δ2, where Δ is the interaction strength. We substantiate this scaling with a Fermi's golden rule calculation in the operator spreading picture, interpreting tD as the fermion-fermion scattering time and lifetime of the single-particle Green's function.
We study the transport properties of generic out-of-equilibrium quantum systems connected to fermionic reservoirs. We develop a perturbation scheme in the inverse system size, named 1/N expansion, to study a large class of out of equilibrium diffusive/ohmic systems. The bare theory is described by a Gaussian action corresponding to a set of independent two level systems at equilibrium. This allows a simple and compact derivation of the diffusive current as a first-order pertubative term. In addition, we obtain exact solutions for a large class of quantum stochastic Hamiltonians (QSHs) with time and space dependent noise, using a self-consistent Born diagrammatic method in the Keldysh representation. We show that these QSHs exhibit diffusive regimes, which are encoded in the Keldysh component of the single particle Green's function. The exact solution for these QSHs models confirms the validity of our system size expansion ansatz, and its efficiency in capturing the transport properties. We consider in particular three fermionic models: (i) a model with local dephasing, (ii) the quantum simple symmetric exclusion process model, and (iii) a model with long-range stochastic hopping. For (i) and (ii) we compute the full temperature and dephasing dependence of the conductance of the system, both for two- and four-points measurements. Our solution gives access to the regime of finite temperature of the reservoirs, which could not be obtained by previous approaches. For (iii), we unveil a ballistic-to-diffusive transition governed by the range and the nature (quantum or classical) of the hopping. As a byproduct, our approach equally describes the mean behavior of quantum systems under continuous measurement.
We introduce and solve the Interacting Quantum Symmetric Exclusion Process (IQSEP), a family of models describing the stochastic quantum hopping of charged particles along the edges of a lattice, with hopping amplitudes that depend on the occupations of neighbouring sites. In the absence of interactions, they reduce to the standard quantum simple symmetric exclusion process, exhibiting coherent diffusive transport. For interactions of order one, they capture incoherent diffusive transport and its fluctuations, characterized by density-dependent diffusivity and mobility, making contact with the macroscopic fluctuation theory. By rescaling the interaction strength appropriately with the lattice mesh, we define a mesoscopic scaling regime that retains a finite coherence length in the continuous thermodynamic limit. This regime interpolates between coherent behavior at small length scales and incoherent behavior at large scales. The resulting scaling theory accounts for fluctuations of quantum coherences in interacting diffusive systems, going beyond the scope of standard fluctuating hydrodynamics.
In the absence of disorder and interactions, fermions move coherently and their associated charge and energy exhibit ballistic spreading, even at finite energy density. In the presence of weak interactions and a finite energy density, fermion-fermion scattering leads to a crossover between early-time ballistic and late-time diffusive transport. The relevant crossover timescales and the transport coefficients are both functions of interaction strength, but the question of determining the precise functional dependence is likely impossible to answer exactly. In this work we develop a numerical method (fDAOE) which is powerful enough to provide an approximate answer to this question, and which is consistent with perturbative arguments in the limit of very weak interactions. Our algorithm, which adapts the existing dissipation-assisted operator evolution (DAOE) to fermions, is applicable to systems of interacting fermions at high temperatures. The algorithm approximates the exact dynamics by systematically discarding information from high n -point functions, and is tailored to capture noninteracting dynamics exactly. Applying our method to a microscopic model of interacting fermions, we numerically determine crossover timescales and diffusion constants for a wide range of interaction strengths. In the limit of weak interaction strength ( Δ ), we demonstrate that the crossover from ballistic to diffusive transport happens at a time tD∼1/Δ2 and that the diffusion constant similarly scales as D∼1/Δ2 . We confirm that these scalings are consistent with a perturbative Fermi's golden rule calculation, and we provide a heuristic operator-spreading picture for the crossover between ballistic and diffusive transport. Published by the American Physical Society 2024
We develop a microscopic transport theory in a randomly driven fermionic model with and without a linear potential. The operator dynamics arise from the competition between noisy and static couplings, leading to diffusion regardless of ballistic transport or Stark localization in the clean limit. The universal diffusive behavior is attributed to a noise-induced bound state arising in the operator equations of motion at small momentum. By mapping the noise-averaged operator equation of motion to a one-dimensional non-Hermitian hopping model, we analytically solve for the diffusion constant, which scales nonmonotonically with noise strength, revealing regions of enhanced and suppressed diffusion from the interplay between on-site and bond dephasing noise, and a linear potential. For large on-site dephasing, the diffusion constant vanishes, indicating an emergent localization. On the other hand, the operator equation becomes the diffusion equation for strong bond dephasing and is unaffected by additional arbitrarily strong static terms that commute with the local charge, including density-density interactions. The bound state enters a continuum of scattering states at finite noise and vanishes. However, the bound state reemerges at an exceptional-like point in the spectrum after the bound-to-scattering state transition. We then characterize the fate of Stark localization in the presence of noise.
We analyze the effects of various forms of noise on one-dimensional systems of noninteracting fermions. In the strong noise limit, we demonstrate, under mild assumptions, that the statistics of the fermionic correlation matrix in the thermodynamic limit follow a universal form described by the recently introduced quantum simple symmetric exclusion process (QSSEP). For charge transport, we show that QSSEP, along with all models in its universality class, shares the same large deviation function for the transferred charge as the classical SSEP model. The method we introduce to derive this result relies on a gaugelike invariance associated with the choice of the bond where the current is measured. This approach enables the explicit calculation of the cumulant-generating function for both QSSEP and SSEP and establishes an exact correspondence between them. These analytical findings are validated by extensive numerical simulations. Our results establish that a wide range of noisy free-fermionic models share the same QSSEP universality class and show that their transport properties are essentially classical.