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arXiv:1410.5838 · Physical Review E

Coexistence of energy diffusion and local thermalization in nonequilibrium XXZ spin chains with integrability breaking

Juan José Mendoza-Arenas, Stephen R. L. Clark, Dieter Jaksch

Published Apr 23, 2015• 35 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

In this work we analyze the simultaneous emergence of diffusive energy transport and local thermalization in a nonequilibrium one-dimensional quantum system, as a result of integrability breaking. Specifically, we discuss the local properties of the steady state induced by thermal boundary driving in a XXZ spin chain with staggered magnetic field. By means of efficient large-scale matrix product simulations of the equation of motion of the system, we calculate its steady state in the long-time limit. We start by discussing the energy transport supported by the system, finding it to be ballistic in the integrable limit and diffusive when the staggered field is finite. Subsequently, we examine the reduced density operators of neighboring sites and find that for large systems they are well approximated by local thermal states of the underlying Hamiltonian in the nonintegrable regime, even for weak staggered fields. In the integrable limit, on the other hand, this behavior is lost, and the identification of local temperatures is no longer possible. Our results agree with the intuitive connection between energy diffusion and thermalization.

DOI
10.1103/physreve.91.042129

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In this work we analyze the simultaneous emergence of diffusive energy transport and local thermalization in a nonequilibrium one-dimensional quantum system, as a result of integrability breaking. Specifically, we discuss the local properties of the steady state induced by thermal boundary driving in a XXZ spin chain with staggered magnetic field. By means of efficient large-scale matrix product simulations of the equation of motion of the system, we calculate its steady state in the long-time limit. We start by discussing the energy transport supported by the system, finding it to be ballistic in the integrable limit and diffusive when the staggered field is finite. Subsequently, we examine the reduced density operators of neighboring sites and find that for large systems they are well approximated by local thermal states of the underlying Hamiltonian in the nonintegrable regime, even for weak staggered fields. In the integrable limit, on the other hand, this behavior is lost, and the identification of local temperatures is no longer possible. Our results agree with the intuitive connection between energy diffusion and thermalization.
We study the spin and energy dynamics in one-dimensional spin-12\frac{1}{2}21​ systems induced by local quantum quenches at finite temperatures using a time-dependent density matrix renormalization group method. System sizes are chosen large enough to ensure that the time-dependent data for the accessible time scales represent the behavior in the thermodynamic limit. As a main result, we observe a ballistic spreading of perturbations of the energy density in the integrable spin-12\frac{1}{2}21​ XXZ chain for all temperatures and exchange anisotropies, related to the divergent thermal conductivity in this model and the exact conservation of the energy current. In contrast, the spin dynamics is ballistic in the massless phase, but shows a diffusive behavior at high temperatures in the easy-axis phase in the case of a vanishing background spin density. We extract a quantitative estimate for the spin-diffusion constant from the time dependence of the spatial variance of the spin density, which agrees well with values obtained from current-current correlation functions using an Einstein relation. Interestingly, the diffusion constant approaches a constant value deep in the easy-axis regime. As an example for nonintegrable models, we consider two-leg ladders, for which we observe indications of diffusive energy and spin dynamics. The relevance of our results for recent experiments with quantum magnets and bosons in optical lattices is discussed.
We study the temperature dependence of energy diffusion in two chaotic gapped quantum spin chains, a tilted-field Ising model and an XZ model, using an open-system approach. We introduce an energy imbalance by coupling the chain to thermal baths at its boundary and study the nonequilibrium steady states of the resulting Lindblad dynamics using a matrix product operator ansatz for the density matrix. We define an effective local temperature profile by comparing local reduced density matrices in the steady state with those of a uniform thermal state. We then measure the energy current for a variety of driving temperatures and extract the temperature dependence of the energy diffusion constant. For the Ising model, we are able to study temperatures well below the energy gap and find a regime of dilute excitations where rare three-body collisions control energy diffusion. A kinetic model correctly predicts the observed exponential increase of the energy diffusion constant at low temperatures. For the XZ model, we are only able to access intermediate to high temperatures relative to the energy gap, and we show that the data are well described by an expansion around the infinite temperature limit. We also discuss the limitations of the particular driving scheme and suggest that lower temperatures can be accessed using larger baths.
We study the ballistic-to-diffusive transition induced by the weak breaking of integrability in a boundary-driven XXZ spin chain. Studying the evolution of the spin current density Js{\mathcal{J}}^{s}Js as a function of the system size LLL, we show that, accounting for boundary effects, the transition has a nontrivial universal behavior close to the XX limit. It is controlled by the scattering length ${L}^{*}\ensuremath{\propto}{V}^{\ensuremath{-}2}$, where VVV is the strength of the integrability-breaking term. In the XXZ model, the interplay of interactions controls the emergence of a transient ``quasiballistic'' regime at length scales much shorter than L∗{L}^{*}L∗. This parametrically large regime is characterized by a strong renormalization of the current which forbids a universal scaling, unlike the XX model. Our results are based on matrix product operator numerical simulations and agree with perturbative analytical calculations.
We study energy transport in disordered XXZXXZXXZ spin-1/2 chains driven to nonequilibrium configurations by thermal reservoirs of different temperatures at the boundaries, using large-scale matrix product simulations. In particular we discuss the transition between diffusive and subdiffusive transport in sectors of zero and finite magnetization at high temperature. At large anisotropies we find that diffusive energy transport prevails over a large range of disorder strengths, which is in contrast to spin transport that is subdiffusive in the same regime for weak disorder. However, at finite magnetization both energy and spin currents decay as a function of the system size with the same exponent. We conclude that diffusion of energy is much more pervasive than that of magnetization in these disordered spin-1/2 systems, and occurs across a significant range of the interaction-disorder parameter phase space. We support the existence of this asymmetry, reminiscent of that in the clean limit, by an analytical estimation of diffusion constants for weak disorder.
Anomalous transport in low dimensional spin chains is an intriguing topic that can offer key insights into the interplay of integrability and symmetry in many-body dynamics. Recent studies have shown that spin-spin correlations in spin chains, where integrability is either perfectly preserved or broken by symmetry-preserving interactions, fall in the Kardar-Parisi-Zhang (KPZ) universality class. Similarly, energy transport can show ballistic or diffusive-like behavior. Although such behavior has been studied under equilibrium conditions, no results on nonequilibrium spin transport in classical spin chains has been reported so far. In this work, we investigate both spin and energy transport in classical spin chains (integrable and nonintegrable) when coupled to two reservoirs at two different temperatures/magnetizations. In both the integrable case and the broken-integrability (but spin-symmetry preserving) case, we report anomalous scaling of spin current with system size (J^{s}∝L^{-μ}), with an exponent value that, within error bars, is close to the KPZ universality class value μ≈2/3. On the other hand, it is noteworthy that the energy current remains ballistic (J^{e}∝L^{-η} with η≈0) in the purely integrable case while there is departure from ballistic behavior (η>0) when integrability is broken regardless of spin-symmetry. We also present results on other interesting observables in the nonequilibrium steady state such as the spatial profiles of magnetization and energy, and spin-spin correlations.
Eigenstate thermalization is widely accepted as the mechanism behind thermalization in generic isolated quantum systems. Using the example of a single magnetic defect embedded in the integrable spin-1/2 XXZ chain, we show that locally perturbing an integrable system can give rise to eigenstate thermalization. Unique to such setups is the fact that thermodynamic and transport properties of the unperturbed integrable chain emerge in properties of the eigenstates of the perturbed (nonintegrable) one. Specifically, we show that the diagonal matrix elements of observables in the perturbed eigenstates follow the microcanonical predictions for the integrable model, and that the ballistic character of spin transport in the integrable model is manifest in the behavior of the off-diagonal matrix elements of the current operator in the perturbed eigenstates.