A numerical linked-cluster algorithm was recently introduced to study quantum quenches in the thermodynamic limit starting from thermal initial states [M. Rigol, Phys. Rev. Lett. 112, 170601 (2014)]. Here, we tailor that algorithm to quenches starting from ground states. In particular, we study quenches from the ground state of the antiferromagnetic Ising model to the XXZ chain. Our results for spin correlations are shown to be in excellent agreement with recent analytical calculations based on the quench action method. We also show that they are different from the correlations in thermal equilibrium, which confirms the expectation that thermalization does not occur in general in integrable models even if they cannot be mapped to noninteracting ones.
A numerical linked-cluster algorithm was recently introduced to study quantum quenches in the thermodynamic limit starting from thermal initial states [M. Rigol, Phys. Rev. Lett. 112, 170601 (2014)]. Here, we tailor that algorithm to quenches starting from ground states. In particular, we study quenches from the ground state of the antiferromagnetic Ising model to the XXZ chain. Our results for spin correlations are shown to be in excellent agreement with recent analytical calculations based on the quench action method. We also show that they are different from the correlations in thermal equilibrium, which confirms the expectation that thermalization does not occur in general in integrable models even if they cannot be mapped to noninteracting ones.
We study quenches in integrable spin-1/2 chains in which we evolve the ground state of the antiferromagnetic Ising model with the anisotropic Heisenberg Hamiltonian. For this nontrivially interacting situation, an application of the first-principles-based quench-action method allows us to give an exact description of the postquench steady state in the thermodynamic limit. We show that a generalized Gibbs ensemble, implemented using all known local conserved charges, fails to reproduce the exact quench-action steady state and to correctly predict postquench equilibrium expectation values of physical observables. This is supported by numerical linked-cluster calculations within the diagonal ensemble in the thermodynamic limit.
We study the nonequilibrium time evolution of the spin-1/2 anisotropic Heisenberg (XXZ) spin chain, with a choice of dimer product and Néel states as initial states. We investigate numerically various short-ranged spin correlators in the long-time limit and find that they deviate significantly from predictions based on the generalized Gibbs ensemble (GGE) hypotheses. By computing the asymptotic spin correlators within the recently proposed quench-action formalism [Phys. Rev. Lett. 110, 257203 (2013)], however, we find excellent agreement with the numerical data. We, therefore, conclude that the GGE cannot give a complete description even of local observables, while the quench-action formalism correctly captures the steady state in this case.
We study quantum quenches in the transverse-field Ising model defined on different lattice geometries such as chains, two- and three-leg ladders, and two-dimensional square lattices. Starting from fully polarized initial states, we consider the dynamics of the transverse and the longitudinal magnetization for quenches to weak, strong, and critical values of the transverse field. To this end, we rely on an efficient combination of numerical linked cluster expansions (NLCEs) and a forward propagation of pure states in real time. As a main result, we demonstrate that NLCEs comprising solely rectangular clusters provide a promising approach to study the real-time dynamics of two-dimensional quantum many-body systems directly in the thermodynamic limit. By comparing to existing data from the literature, we unveil that NLCEs yield converged results on time scales which are competitive to other state-of-the-art numerical methods.
We study quantum quenches between integrable and nonintegrable hard-core boson models in the thermodynamic limit with numerical linked cluster expansions. We show that while quenches in which the initial state is a thermal equilibrium state of an integrable model and the final Hamiltonian is nonintegrable (quantum chaotic) lead to thermalization, the reverse is not true. While this might appear counterintuitive given the fact that the eigenstates of both Hamiltonians are related by a unitary transformation, we argue that it is generic. Hence, the lack of thermalization of integrable systems is robust against quenches starting from stationary states of nonintegrable ones. Nonintegrable systems thermalize independently of the nature of the initial Hamiltonian.
The study of quantum dynamics is an increasingly important aspect of atomic, molecular and optical physics, as well as condensed-matter physics and other disciplines. It is essential in order to understand non-equilibrium phenomena which do not fit within the framework of equilibrium thermodynamics, such as many-body localization, dynamical quantum phase transitions, and non-equilibrium steady states in driven-dissipative systems. However, the exact calculation of dynamical observables is extremely difficult in general for several reasons, which makes it challenging for theoretical predictions and analyses to keep pace with rapidly advancing experiments. In this thesis I use and develop several computational methods to investigate the dynamics of quantum many-body systems, with the two goals of better understanding the evolution of local observables and correlation functions in spin and Fermion systems as well as creating and testing more effective numerical methods for solving quantum dynamics problems. I explore quantum dynamics by using Hamiltonian parameter quenches in several commonly-used models in AMO physics and elsewhere: the Fermi-Hubbard model, the XXZ model, and the transverse-Ising model. The first represents a system of short-range interacting Fermions, while the latter two represent spin systems with different spin-spin couplings and magnetic field terms. All of these models can be realized in current experiments. First, I derive an exact solution for an extreme interaction quench in the Fermi-Hubbard model, from a strongly-interacting initial state to a noninteracting final Hamiltonian. From this result I show that there are nontrivial transient connected correlations, despite the fact that the system has very high temperature and a noninteracting Hamiltonian. Those features would suppress such correlations in equilibrium, but the dynamical correlations are still significant. Then, I develop and examine two numerical methods for solving dynamics of the spin expectation values and correlation functions in the transverse-Ising and XXZ models. Both methods rely on approximating a thermodynamically large system with a much smaller and more computationally tractable cluster of lattice sites, or a series of clusters. The first method is a dynamical numerical linked cluster expansion (NLCE). NLCEs have already been used successfully on systems in thermodynamic equilibrium, and I extended the technique to directly compute the dynamics of an observable after a quantum quench. I review the general NLCE method, describe my dynamical variant of it, and compute the quench dynamics of spin and correlation observables in the transverse-Ising and XXZ models. The second method, which I term the adaptive-boundary cluster method, relies on recently refined bounds on information propagation in quantum systems to choose a cluster of lattice sites that minimizes the finite size error bound of a dynamical computation. I briefly review these bounds, and describe a new algorithm which uses them to construct a cluster whose boundary is chosen according to a related error estimate. Such an adaptive-boundary cluster has the property that there exists a computable upper bound on the finite size error of observables measured at the cluster center, and this error bound is nearly minimal when compared to that of other clusters of the same size. I then compute the quench dynamics of spin and correlation observables in the transverse-Ising model using the adaptive boundary clusters. I apply this method to both uniform and strongly disordered systems. To evaluate the effectiveness of both dynamical NLCE and adaptive-boundary clusters, I compare the results obtained using them to results from a standard and general purpose numerical method: exact solvers applied a rectangular cluster with periodic boundary conditions. Both of the new methods usually converge faster and are more accurate than the standard method for comparable cluster sizes. This thesis illustrates that choosing numerical methods which take advantage of the geometric and entanglement structure of the initial state and Hamiltonian can substantially enhance our ability to study quantum dynamics, by reducing the computational cost of numerically exact solutions. I conclude with a discussion of various avenues for future research to build on this work.
We study properties of isolated integrable quantum systems after a sudden quench starting from thermal states. We show that, even if the system is initially in thermal equilibrium at finite temperature, the diagonal entropy after a quench remains a fraction of the entropy in the generalized ensembles introduced to describe integrable systems after relaxation. The latter is also, in general, different from the entropy in thermal equilibrium. Furthermore, we examine the difference in the distributions of conserved quantities in the thermal versus the generalized ensembles after a quench and show that they are also, in general, different from each other. This explains why these systems fail to thermalize. A finite-size scaling analysis is presented for each quantity, which allows us to make predictions for thermodynamically large lattice sizes.