Abstract We study the effect of two simultaneous local quenches on the evolution of the Loschmidt echo (LE) and entanglement entropy (EE) of a one dimensional transverse Ising model. In this work, one of the local quenches involves the connection of two spin-1/2 chains at a certain time and the other corresponds to a sudden change in the magnitude of the transverse field at a given site in one of the spin chains. We numerically calculate the dynamics associated with the LE and the EE as a result of such double quenches, and discuss the various timescales involved in this problem using the picture of quasiparticles (QPs) generated as a result of such quenches. We perform a detailed analysis of the probability of QPs produced at the two sites and the nature of the QPs in various phases, and obtain interesting results. More specifically, we find partial reflection of these QPs at the defect center or the site of h -quench, resulting in new timescales which have never been reported before.
Abstract We study the effect of two simultaneous local quenches on the evolution of the Loschmidt echo (LE) and entanglement entropy (EE) of a one dimensional transverse Ising model. In this work, one of the local quenches involves the connection of two spin-1/2 chains at a certain time and the other corresponds to a sudden change in the magnitude of the transverse field at a given site in one of the spin chains. We numerically calculate the dynamics associated with the LE and the EE as a result of such double quenches, and discuss the various timescales involved in this problem using the picture of quasiparticles (QPs) generated as a result of such quenches. We perform a detailed analysis of the probability of QPs produced at the two sites and the nature of the QPs in various phases, and obtain interesting results. More specifically, we find partial reflection of these QPs at the defect center or the site of h -quench, resulting in new timescales which have never been reported before.
Abstract. We study a particular type of local quench in a generic quantum critical one-dimensional system, using conformal field theory (CFT) techniques, and providing numerical checks of the results in free fermion systems. The system is initially cut into two subsystems A and B which are glued together at time t = 0. We study the entanglement entropy (EE) between the two parts A and B, using previous results by Calabrese and Cardy [1, 2], and further extending them. We also study in detail the (logarithmic) Loschmidt echo (LLE). For finite-size systems both quantities turn out to be (almost) periodic in the scaling limit, and exhibit striking light-cone effects. While these two quantities behave similarly immediately after the quench—namely as c/3 log t for the EE and c/4 log t for the LLE—, we observe some discrepancy once the excitations emitted by the quench bounce on the boundary and evolve within the same subsystem A (or B). The decay of the EE is then non-universal, as noticed by Eisler and Peschel [3]. In contrast, we find that the evolution of the LLE is less sensitive than the EE to non-universal details of the model, and is still accurately described by our CFT prediction. To further probe these light-cone effects, we also introduce a variant of the Loschmidt echo specifically constructed to detect the excitations emitted just after the quench.
We study a particular type of local quench in a generic quantum critical one-dimensional system, using conformal field theory (CFT) techniques, and providing numerical checks of the results in free fermion systems. The system is initially cut into two subsystems A and B which are glued together at time t = 0. We study the entropy of entanglement (EE) between the two parts A and B , using previous results obtained by Calabrese and Cardy (2004 J. Stat. Mech. P06002; 2007 J. Stat. Mech. P10004), and further extending them. We also study in detail the (logarithmic) Loschmidt echo (LLE). For finite size systems both quantities turn out to be (almost) periodic in the scaling limit, and exhibit striking light-cone effects. While these two quantities behave similarly immediately after the quench—namely as c /3log t for the EE and c /4log t for the LLE—we observe some discrepancy once the excitations emitted by the quench bounce on the boundary and evolve within the same subsystem A (or B ). The decay of the EE is then non-universal, as noticed by Eisler and Peschel (2007 J. Stat. Mech. P06005). In contrast, we find that the evolution of the LLE is less sensitive than the EE to non-universal details of the model, and is still accurately described by our CFT prediction. To further probe these light-cone effects, we also introduce a variant of the Loschmidt echo specifically constructed to detect the excitations emitted just after the quench.
Abstract We study the non-equilibrium evolution of concurrence of a Bell pair constituted of two qubits, through the measurement of Loschmidt echo (LE) under the scope of generalized central spin model. The qubits are locally coupled to a one dimensional disordered Ising spin chain. We first show that in equilibrium situation the derivative of LE is able to detect the extent of Griffiths phase that appeared in presence of disordered transverse field only. While in the non-equilibrium situation, the spin chain requires a temporal window to realize the effect of disorder. We show that within this timescale, LE falls off exponentially and this decay is maximally controlled by the initial states and coupling strength. Our detail investigation suggests that there actually exist three types of exponential decay, a Gaussian decay in ultra short time scale followed by two exponential decay in the intermediate time with two different decay exponents. The effect of the disorder starts appearing in the late time power law fall of LE where the power law exponent is strongly dependent on disorder strength and the final state but almost independent of initial states and coupling strength. This feature allows us to indicate the presence of Griffiths phase. To be precise, continuously varying critical exponent and wide distribution of relaxation time imprint their effect in LE in the late time limit where the power law fall is absent for quenching to a Griffiths phase. Here, LE vanishes following the fast exponential fall. Interestingly, for off-critical quenching LE attains a higher saturation value for increasing disorder strength, otherwise vanishes for a clean spin chain, referring to the fact that disorder prohibits the rapid decay of entanglement in long time limit. Moreover, we show that disorder is also able to destroy the light cone like nature of post quench quasi-particles as LE does not sense the singular time scales appearing for clean spin chain with qubits coupled at symmetric positions.
Quantum quench is a non-equilibrium process where the Hamiltonian is suddenly changed during the quantum evolution. The change can be made by spatially local perturbations (local quench) or globally switching to a completely different Hamiltonian (global quench). This thesis investigates the post-quench non-equilibrium dynamics with an emphasis on the time dependence of the quantum entanglement. We inspect the scaling of entanglement entropy (EE) to learn how correlation and entanglement built up in a quench. We begin with two local quench examples. In Chap. 2, we apply a local operator to the groundstate of the quantum Lifshitz model and monitor the change of the EE. We find that the entanglement grows according to the dynamical exponent z = 2 and then saturates to the scaling dimension of the perturbing operator -- a value representing its strength. In Chap. 3, we study the evolution after connecting two different one-dimensional critical chains at their ends. The Loschmidt echo which measures the similarity between the evolved state and the initial one decays with a power law, whose exponent is the scaling dimension of the defect (junction). Among other conclusions, we see that the local quench dynamics contain universal information of the (critical) theory. In the global quench scenario, the change of the Hamiltonian affects all parts of the system. In this thesis, we focus on the global chaotic quench driven by generic non-integrable Hamiltonians. In Chap. 4, we propose to use the operator entanglement entropy of the unitary operator as a probe. Its fast linear entanglement production is sharply contrasted to the slow logarithmic spreading of the many-body localized system. The entanglement saturation suggests that the evolution operator in the long time can be modeled by a random unitary matrix. In Chap. 5, we construct a random tensor network which consists of random unitary matrices connected locally to model chaotic evolution with local interactions. We find that the entanglement dynamics is mapped to the statistical mechanics of interacting random walks. This appealing emergent picture allows us to understand the universal linear growth as well as the fluctuations of entanglement in a chaotic quench.
We study the Loschmidt echo (LE) in a central spin model in which a central spin is globally coupled to an environment (E) which is subjected to a small and sudden quench at t=0, so that its state at t=0+ remains the same as the ground state of the initial environmental Hamiltonian before the quench; this leads to a nonequilibrium situation. This state now evolves with two Hamiltonians, the final Hamiltonian following the quench and its modified version which incorporates an additional term arising due to the coupling of the central spin to the environment. Using a generic short-time scaling of the decay rate, we establish that in the early-time limit, the rate of decay of the LE close to the quantum critical point (QCP) of E is independent of the quenching. We also study the temporal evolution of the LE and establish the presence of a crossover to a situation where the quenching becomes irrelevant. In the limit of large quench amplitude the nonequilibrium initial condition is found to result in a drastic increase in decoherence at large times, even far away from a QCP. These generic results are verified analytically as well as numerically, choosing E to be a transverse Ising chain where the transverse field is suddenly quenched.
We study the time evolution in the transverse-field Ising chain subject to quantum quenches of finite duration, ie, a continuous change in the transverse magnetic field over a finite time. Specifically, we consider the dynamics of the total energy, one- and two-point correlation functions and Loschmidt echo during and after the quench as well as their stationary behaviour at late times. We investigate how different quench protocols affect the dynamics and identify universal properties of the relaxation.