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arXiv:1411.0470 · Journal of Physics A Mathematical and Theoretical

Non-equilibrium conformal field theories with impurities

Denis Bernard, Benjamin Doyon, Jacopo Viti

Published Jan 13, 2015• 42 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

We present a construction of non-equilibrium steady states within conformal field theory. These states sustain energy flows between two quantum systems, initially prepared at different temperatures, whose dynamical properties are represented by two, possibly different, conformal field theories connected through an impurity. This construction relies on a real time formulation of conformal defect dynamics based on a field scattering picture parallelizing—but yet different from—the Euclidean formulation. We present the basic characteristics of this formulation and give an algebraic construction of the real time scattering maps that we illustrate in the case of -based conformal field theories.

DOI
10.1088/1751-8113/48/5/05ft01

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We study the energy current and its fluctuations in quantum gapless 1d systems far from equilibrium modeled by conformal field theory, where two separated halves are prepared at distinct temperatures and glued together at a point contact. We prove that these systems converge towards steady states, and give a general description of such non-equilibrium steady states in terms of quantum field theory data. We compute the large deviation function, also called the full counting statistics, of energy transfer through the contact. These are universal and satisfy fluctuation relations. We provide a simple representation of these quantum fluctuations in terms of classical Poisson processes whose intensities are proportional to Boltzmann weights.
Abstract We set up a scattering experiment of matter against an impurity which separates two generic one-dimensional critical quantum systems. We compute the flux of reflected and transmitted energy, thus defining a precise measure of the transparency of the interface between the related two-dimensional conformal field theories. If the largest symmetry algebra is Virasoro, we find that the reflection and transmission coefficients are independent of the details of the initial state, and are fixed in terms of the central charges and of the two-point function of the displacement operator. The situation is more elaborate when extended symmetries are present. Positivity of the total energy flux at infinity imposes bounds on the coefficient of the two-point function of the displacement operator, which controls the free-energy cost of a small deformation of the interface. Finally, we study out-of-equilibrium steady states of a critical system connecting two reservoirs at different temperatures. In the absence of extended symmetries, our result implies that the energy flux across an impurity is proportional to the difference of the squared temperatures and controlled by the reflection coefficient.