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arXiv:1310.5153 · Physical Review A

Quench dynamics of isolated many-body quantum systems

Eduardo Jonathan Torres-Herrera, Léa Ferreira dos Santos

Published Apr 24, 2014• 77 citations
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Abstract

We study isolated quantum systems with two-body interactions after a quench. In these systems, the energy shell is a Gaussian of width $\ensuremath{\sigma}$, and it gives the maximum possible spreading of the energy distribution of the initial states. When the distribution achieves this shape, the fidelity decay can be Gaussian until saturation. This establishes a lower bound for the fidelity decay in realistic systems. An ultimate bound for systems with many-body interactions is also derived based on the analysis of full random matrices. We find excellent agreement between numerical and analytical results. We also provide the conditions under which the short-time dynamics of few-body observables is controlled by $\ensuremath{\sigma}$. The analyses are developed for systems, initial states, and observables accessible to experiments.

DOI
10.1103/physreva.89.043620

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We study isolated quantum systems with two-body interactions after a quench. In these systems, the energy shell is a Gaussian of width \ensuremathσ\ensuremath{\sigma}\ensuremathσ, and it gives the maximum possible spreading of the energy distribution of the initial states. When the distribution achieves this shape, the fidelity decay can be Gaussian until saturation. This establishes a lower bound for the fidelity decay in realistic systems. An ultimate bound for systems with many-body interactions is also derived based on the analysis of full random matrices. We find excellent agreement between numerical and analytical results. We also provide the conditions under which the short-time dynamics of few-body observables is controlled by \ensuremathσ\ensuremath{\sigma}\ensuremathσ. The analyses are developed for systems, initial states, and observables accessible to experiments.
We study numerically and analytically isolated interacting quantum systems that are taken out of equilibrium instantaneously (quenched). The probability of finding the initial state in time, the so-called fidelity, decays fastest for systems described by full random matrices, where simultaneous many-body interactions are implied. In the realm of realistic systems with two-body interactions, the dynamics is slower and depends on the interplay between the initial state and the Hamiltonian characterizing the system. The fastest fidelity decay in this case is Gaussian and can persist until saturation. A simple general picture, in which the fidelity plays a central role, is also achieved for the short-time dynamics of few-body observables. It holds for initial states that are eigenstates of the observables. We also discuss the need to reassess analytical expressions that were previously proposed to describe the evolution of the Shannon entropy. Our analyses are mainly developed for initial states that can be prepared in experiments with cold atoms in optical lattices.
We study isolated many-body quantum systems after a quench and show that their dynamics depends on the interplay between the initial state and the Hamiltonian dictating the evolution. The systems are in the nonperturbative regime. The relaxation process is controlled by the width of the energy distribution of the initial state and may be very similar for both chaotic and integrable Hamiltonians. We derive an analytical expression for the fidelity decay, which displays excellent agreement with our numerical results. This decay is Gaussian and may persist until saturation. Analytical expressions that describe very well the initial evolution of the Shannon entropy and of few-body observables are also provided. The analyses are developed for deterministic one-dimensional systems and initial states of interest to current experiments with cold atoms in optical lattices.
We provide an overview of our numerical and analytical studies of isolated interacting quantum systems that are abruptly quenched out of equilibrium instantaneously. We describe the relaxation process to a new equilibrium and obtain lower bounds for the relaxation time of full random matrices and realistic systems with two-body interactions. We show that the size of the time fluctuations after relaxation decays exponentially with system size for systems without too many degeneracies. We also discuss the conditions for thermalization and demonstrate that it can happen after local and global quenches in space. The analyses are developed for systems, initial states, and few-body observables accessible to experiments with optical lattices.
We study isolated finite interacting quantum systems after an instantaneous perturbation and show three scenarios in which the probability for finding the initial state later in time (fidelity) decays nonexponentially, often all the way to saturation. The decays analyzed involve Gaussian, Bessel of the first kind, and cosine squared functions. The Gaussian behavior emerges in systems with two-body interactions in the limit of strong perturbation. The Bessel function, associated with the evolution under full random matrices, is obtained with surprisingly sparse random matrices. The cosine squared behavior, established by the energy-time uncertainty relation, is approached after a local perturbation in space.
We demonstrate analytically and numerically that in isolated quantum systems of many interacting particles, the number of many-body states participating in the evolution after a quench increases exponentially in time, provided the eigenstates are delocalized in the energy shell. The rate of the exponential growth is defined by the width Γ of the local density of states and is associated with the Kolmogorov-Sinai entropy for systems with a well-defined classical limit. In a finite system, the exponential growth eventually saturates due to the finite volume of the energy shell. We estimate the timescale for the saturation and show that it is much larger than ℏ/Γ. Numerical data obtained for a two-body random interaction model of bosons and for a dynamical model of interacting spin-1/2 particles show excellent agreement with the analytical predictions.
We analyze time evolution of spread complexity (SC) in an isolated interacting quantum many-body system when it is subjected to a sudden quench. Characteristics features of the time evolution of the SC after the quench are analyzed for different timescales, both in integrable and chaotic models. For a short time after the quench, the SC shows universal quadratic growth, irrespective of the initial state or the nature of the Hamiltonian, with the timescale of this growth being determined by the local density of states. The characteristics of the SC in the next phase depend on the nature of the system, and we show that, depending on whether the survival probability of an initial state is Gaussian or exponential, the SC can continue to grow quadratically, or it can show linear growth. To understand the behavior of the SC at late times, we consider sudden quenches in two models, a full random matrix in the Gaussian orthogonal ensemble, and a spin-1/21/21/2 system with disorder. We observe that, for the full random matrix model and the chaotic phase of the spin-1/21/21/2 system, the SC shows linear growth at early times and saturation at late times. The full random matrix case shows a peak in the intermediate-time region, whereas this feature is less prominent in the spin-1/21/21/2 system, as we explain.