There has been much recent interest in the study of out of equilibrium quantum systems due to experimental advances in trapped cold atomic gases that allow systematic studies of these effects.In this work we study a quantum Ising model in the presence of transverse and longitudinal magnetic fields.The model lacks an analytical solution in the most general case and has to be treated numerically.We first investigate the static properties of the model, including the ground state energy and the zero temperature phase diagram, using the Density Matrix Renormalization Group (DMRG) method.We identify ordered and disordered phases separated by a quantum phase transition.We then consider the time evolution of the system following an abrupt quench of the fields.We study the response of the order parameter to the quenches within the ordered and disordered phases as well as quenches between the phases using the time-dependent DMRG method.The results are in qualitative agreement with experiments and the implemented numerical method in this work can be extended to allow for more general interactions.iii I would like to thank my supervisor, Dr. Malcolm Kennett, whose constant support and hope in the most disappointing situations, his helpful guidance, and endless energy were all new and very invaluable to me.I like to thank my
Based on the obtained exact results we systematically study the quench dynamics of a one-dimensional spin-1/2 transverse field Ising model with zero- and finite-temperature initial states. We focus on the magnetization of the system after a sudden change of the external field and a coherent time-evolution process. With a zero-temperature initial state, the quench magnetic susceptibility as a function of the initial field strength exhibits strongly similar scaling behaviors to those of the static magnetic susceptibility, and the quench magnetic susceptibility as a function of the final field strength shows a discontinuity at the quantum critical point. This discontinuity remains robust and always occurs at the quantum critical point even for the case of finite-temperature initial systems, which indicates a great advantage of employing quench dynamics to study quantum phase transitions.
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 investigate the quantum dynamics generated by quantum quenches (QQs) of the Hamiltonian parameters in many-body systems, focusing on protocols that cross first-order and continuous quantum transitions, both in finite-size systems and in the thermodynamic limit. As a paradigmatic example, we consider the quantum Ising chain in the presence of homogeneous transverse (
g) and longitudinal (
h) magnetic fields. This model exhibits a continuous quantum transition (CQT) at
g=gc and
h=0, and first-order quantum transitions (FOQTs) driven by
h along the line
h=0 (
g<gc). In the integrable limit
h=0, the system can be mapped onto a quadratic fermionic theory; however, any nonvanishing longitudinal field breaks integrability and the spectrum of the resulting Hamiltonian is generally expected to enter a chaotic regime. We analyze QQs in which the longitudinal field is suddenly changed from a negative value
hi<0 to a positive value
hf>0. We focus on values of
hf such that the spectrum of the post-QQ Hamiltonian
H(g,hf) lies in the chaotic regime, where thermalization may emerge at asymptotically long times. We study the out-of-equilibrium dynamics for different values of
g, finding qualitatively distinct behaviors for
g>gc (where the chain is in the disordered phase), for
g=gc (QQ across the CQT), and for
g<gc (QQ across the FOQT line).
We study the quantum dynamics resulting from preparing a one-dimensional quantum system in the ground state of initially two decoupled parts which are then joined together (local quench). Specifically we focus on the transverse Ising chain and compute the time-dependence of the magnetization profile, m_l(t), and correlation functions at the critical point, in the ferromagnetically ordered phase and in the paramagnetic phase. At the critical point we find finite size scaling forms for the nonequilibrium magnetization and compare predictions of conformal field theory with our numerical results. In the ferromagnetic phase the magnetization profiles are well matched by our predictions from a quasi-classical calculation.
Mapping finite-temperature dynamical phase diagrams of quantum many-body models is a necessary step towards establishing a framework of far-from-equilibrium quantum many-body universality. However, this is quite difficult due, in part, to the severe challenges in representing the volume-law entanglement that is generated under nonequilibrium dynamics at finite temperatures. Here, we address these challenges with an efficient equilibrium quantum Monte Carlo (QMC) framework for computing the finite-temperature dynamical phase diagram. Our method uses energy conservation and the self-thermalizing properties of ergodic quantum systems to determine observables at late times after a quantum quench. We use this technique to chart the dynamical phase diagram of the
2+1D quantum Ising model generated by quenches of the transverse field in initial thermal states. Our approach allows us to track the evolution of dynamical phases as a function of both the initial temperature and transverse field. Surprisingly, we identify quenches in the ordered phase that cool the system as well as an interval of initial temperatures where it is possible to quench from the paramagnetic (PM) to ferromagnetic (FM) phases. Our method gives access to dynamical properties without explicitly simulating unitary time evolution, and is immediately applicable to other lattice geometries and interacting many-body systems. Finally, we propose a quantum simulation experiment on state-of-the-art digital quantum hardware to directly probe the predicted dynamical phases and their real-time formation.