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arXiv:1405.4224 · Physical Review A

Failure of the local generalized Gibbs ensemble for integrable models with bound states

Garry Goldstein, Natan Andrei

Published Oct 23, 2014• 98 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

In this work we study the applicability of the local generalized Gibbs ensemble (GGE) to integrable one-dimensional systems with bound states. We find that the GGE, when defined using only local conserved quantities, fails to describe the long-time dynamics for most initial states, including eigenstates. We present our calculations by studying the attractive Lieb-Liniger gas and the $XXZ$ magnet, although similar results may be obtained for other models.

DOI
10.1103/physreva.90.043625

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In this work we study the applicability of the local generalized Gibbs ensemble (GGE) to integrable one-dimensional systems with bound states. We find that the GGE, when defined using only local conserved quantities, fails to describe the long-time dynamics for most initial states, including eigenstates. We present our calculations by studying the attractive Lieb-Liniger gas and the XXZXXZXXZ magnet, although similar results may be obtained for other models.
We obtain exact results on interaction quenches in the 1D Bose gas described by the integrable Lieb-Liniger model. We show that in the long time limit integrability leads to significant deviations from the predictions of the grand canonical ensemble and a description within the generalized Gibbs ensemble (GGE) is needed. For a non-interacting initial state and arbitrary final interactions, we find that the presence of infinitely many conserved charges generates a non-analytic behavior in the equilibrated density of quasimomenta. This manifests itself in a dynamically generated Friedel-like oscillation of the non-local correlation functions with interaction dependent oscillation momenta. We also exactly evaluate local correlations and the generalized chemical potentials within GGE.
It has been recently observed for a particular quantum quench in the XXZ spin chain that local observables do not equilibrate to the predictions of the generalized Gibbs ensemble (GGE). In this work we argue that the breakdown of the GGE can be attributed to the failure of the generalized eigenstate thermalization hypothesis (GETH), which has been the main candidate for explaining the validity of the GGE. We provide explicit counterexamples to the GETH and argue that generally it does not hold in models with multiple particle species. Therefore, there is no reason to assume that the GGE should describe the long time limit of observables in these integrable models.
Integrable quantum systems evolving from non-equilibrium initial states do not thermalize to conventional Gibbs ensembles (GE). Instead, at long times they relax to generalized Gibbs ensembles (GGEs), which incorporate the full set of local and quasi-local conserved quantities. While GGEs have been extensively studied in the literature, a quantitative analytic characterization of how different they are from ordinary GEs is still lacking. In this work, we address this question by employing the concept of athermality, which we define within quantum resource theory as the relative entropy between a given state and the closest thermal state. By means of integrability techniques we compute the athermality for several quantum quenches in paradigmatic integrable models, including the free XY spin chain, the interacting Lieb-Liniger model, the XXZ spin chain, and the harmonic chain. We find that often the athermality becomes anomalously small when the post-quench Hamiltonian is critical in its ground state, despite probing physics at a finite energy density. We also prove that it systematically develops a singularity at criticality, which is inherited from the entropy of the GGE.
Abstract The generalized Gibbs ensemble (GGE) was introduced ten years ago to describe observables in isolated integrable quantum systems after equilibration. Since then, the GGE has been demonstrated to be a powerful tool to predict the outcome of the relaxation dynamics of few-body observables in a variety of integrable models, a process we call generalized thermalization. This review discusses several fundamental aspects of the GGE and generalized thermalization in integrable systems. In particular, we focus on questions such as: which observables equilibrate to the GGE predictions and who should play the role of the bath; what conserved quantities can be used to construct the GGE; what are the differences between generalized thermalization in noninteracting systems and in interacting systems mappable to noninteracting ones; why is it that the GGE works when traditional ensembles of statistical mechanics fail. Despite a lot of interest in these questions in recent years, no definite answers have been given. We review results for the XX model and for the transverse field Ising model. For the latter model, we also report original results and show that the GGE describes spin–spin correlations over the entire system. This makes apparent that there is no need to trace out a part of the system in real space for equilibration to occur and for the GGE to apply. In the past, a spectral decomposition of the weights of various statistical ensembles revealed that generalized eigenstate thermalization occurs in the XX model (hard-core bosons). Namely, eigenstates of the Hamiltonian with similar distributions of conserved quantities have similar expectation values of few-spin observables. Here we show that generalized eigenstate thermalization also occurs in the transverse field Ising model.
The nonequilibrium dynamics of integrable systems are highly constrained by the conservation of certain charges. There is substantial evidence that after a quantum quench they do not thermalize but their asymptotic steady state can be described by a generalized Gibbs ensemble (GGE) built from the conserved charges. Most of the studies on the GGE so far have focused on models that can be mapped to quadratic systems, while analytic treatment in nonquadratic systems remained elusive. We obtain results on interaction quenches in a nonquadratic continuum system, the one-dimensional (1D) Bose gas described by the integrable Lieb-Liniger model. The direct implementation of the GGE prescription is prohibited by the divergence of the conserved charges, which we conjecture to be endemic to any continuum integrable systems with contact interactions undergoing a sudden quench. We compute local correlators for a noninteracting initial state and arbitrary final interactions as well as two-point functions for quenches to the Tonks-Girardeau regime. We show that in the long time limit integrability leads to significant deviations from the predictions of the grand canonical ensemble, allowing for an experimental verification in cold-atom systems.
Abstract We revisit the question of whether and how the steady states arising after non-equilibrium time evolution in integrable models (and in particular in the XXZ spin chain) can be described by the so-called generalized Gibbs ensemble (GGE). Whereas it is known that the micro-canonical ensemble built on a complete set of charges correctly describes the long-time limit of local observables, it has been shown recently by Ilievski et al that the corresponding canonical ensemble is not well defined, and instead a different canonical ensemble was proposed in terms of particle occupation number operators. Here we provide an alternative construction by considering truncated GGEs (tGGEs) that include only a finite number of local and quasi-local conserved operators. It is shown that the tGGEs can approximate the steady states with arbitrary precision, i.e. all physical observables are exactly reproduced in the infinite truncation limit. We trace back the problems encountered in defining an untruncated GGE to the dependence of the associated Lagrange multipliers on the truncation index. Conversely, we show that this problem may be circumvented by considering a new set of (quasi)local charges which are linear combinations of the standard ones, and whose associated Lagrange multipliers are well-defined state functions. Our general arguments are applied to concrete quench situations in the XXZ chain, where the initial states are simple two-site or four-site product states. Depending on the quench we find that numerical results for the local correlators can be obtained with remarkable precision using truncated GGEs with only 10–100 charges.