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arXiv:1607.02272 · Europhysics Letters (EPL)

Effective time reversal and echo dynamics in the transverse field Ising model

Markus Schmitt, Stefan K. Kehrein

Published Sep 1, 2016• 16 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

The question of thermalisation in closed quantum many-body systems has received a lot of attention in the past few years. An intimately related question is whether a closed quantum system shows irreversible dynamics. However, irreversibility and what we actually mean by this in a quantum many-body system with unitary dynamics has been explored very little. In this work we investigate the dynamics of the Ising model in a transverse magnetic field involving an imperfect effective time reversal. We propose a definition of irreversibility based on the echo peak decay of observables. Inducing the effective time reversal by different protocols we find an algebraic decay of the echo peak heights or an ever persisting echo peak indicating that the dynamics in this model is well reversible.

DOI
10.1209/0295-5075/115/50001

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The question of thermalisation in closed quantum many-body systems has received a lot of attention in the past few years. An intimately related question is whether a closed quantum system shows irreversible dynamics. However, irreversibility and what we actually mean by this in a quantum many-body system with unitary dynamics has been explored very little. In this work we investigate the dynamics of the Ising model in a transverse magnetic field involving an imperfect effective time reversal. We propose a definition of irreversibility based on the echo peak decay of observables. Inducing the effective time reversal by different protocols we find an algebraic decay of the echo peak heights or an ever persisting echo peak indicating that the dynamics in this model is well reversible.
The concept of irreversibility is necessary to justify the statistical description of many-body systems. Here, the authors study the dynamics of observable echoes in quantum many-body systems occurring when the time-evolution is effectively inverted. For nonintegrable systems they find that small imperfections in the time-reversal procedure that alter the state of the system lead to exponentially decaying echoes. As the corresponding decay rate is largely independent of the strength of the perturbation, an intrinsic sensitivity to the perturbation is revealed. This implies irreversibility of the dynamics for all practical purposes, similar to the situation in chaotic classical systems.
This thesis addresses different aspects of the dynamics of isolated quantum many-body systems far from equilibrium, ranging from transient phenomena at short times to questions about relaxation and equilibration at late times. The first part deals with nonequilibrium critical phenomena. Dynamical quantum phase transitions are characterized in a two-dimensional spin system by studying the distribution of Fisher zeros in the complex time plane. Moreover, a new topologically driven transition in the nonequilibrium steady state of quenched Chern insulators is investigated, resulting in the identification of universal nonanalytic behavior of the Hall conductance as a function of the quench parameter. The second part of the thesis comprises a study of transient dynamics of the transverse-field Ising model in two and three dimensions based on a perturbative derivation of classical networks to encode the time-evolved wave function; this construction is also applicable to represent the state as an artificial neural network. In the last part of the thesis a possible definition of the irreversibility of quantum many-body dynamics is introduced, which is based on the echo dynamics of observables under imperfect effective time reversal. Echo dynamics is studied in generic and integrable quantum systems as well as in the semiclassical limit. The relation to out-of-time-order correlators is explored, which were recently introduced to probe the quantum butterfly effect.
Abstract Echo protocols provide a means to investigate the arrow of time in macroscopic processes. Starting from a nonequilibrium state, the many-body quantum system under study is evolved for a certain period of time τ. Thereafter, an (effective) time reversal is performed that would – if implemented perfectly – take the system back to the initial state after another time period τ. Typical examples are nuclear magnetic resonance imaging and polarisation echo experiments. The presence of small, uncontrolled inaccuracies during the backward propagation results in deviations of the “echo signal” from the original evolution and can be exploited to quantify the instability of nonequilibrium states and the irreversibility of the dynamics. We derive an analytic prediction for the typical dependence of this echo signal for macroscopic observables on the magnitude of the inaccuracies and on the duration τ of the process, and verify it in numerical examples.
Understanding the footprints of chaos in quantum-many-body systems has been under debate for a long time. In this work, we study the echo dynamics of the Sherrington-Kirkpatrick (SK) model with transverse field under effective time reversal. We investigate numerically its quantum and semiclassical dynamics. We explore how chaotic many-body quantum physics can lead to exponential divergence of the echo of observables and we show that it is a result of three requirements: i) the collective nature of the observable, ii) a properly chosen initial state and iii) the existence of a well-defined chaotic semi-classical (large-N) limit. Under these conditions, the echo grows exponentially up to the Ehrenfest time, which scales logarithmically with the number of spins N. In this regime, the echo is well described by the semiclassical (truncated Wigner) approximation. We also discuss a short-range version of the SK model, where the Ehrenfest time does not depend on N and the quantum echo shows only polynomial growth. Our findings provide new insights on scrambling and echo dynamics and how to observe it experimentally.
Exact results for time evolution of a many-body quantum system (a transverse field Ising spin chain) under the action of several pulses of an external field are obtained. Unlike the situation with a single pulse, the magnetization depends on time for the sequence of two pulses. For the two-pulse case the magnetization does not depend on the value of the time spacing between pulses, in sharp contrast with the standard spin echo cases. Modulated oscillations of magnetization with time do not decay if the energy of eigenstates of the system before pulses is kkk independent (k(k(k is the quasimomentum), while for kkk-dependent initial eigenstates the modulated oscillations of magnetization decay (without inclusion of the ``external'' relaxation) to the steady-state value, depending on the parameters of pulses; i.e., the oscillations reveal time irreversibility.
In spin systems, the decay of the Loschmidt echo in the time-reversal experiment (evolution-perturbation-time-reversed evolution) is linked to the generation of multiple-quantum (MQ) coherences. Unlimited growth of the MQ coherences leads to irreversibility of dynamics. In some cases, one can expect that the deviation of the Loschmidt echo and the second moment of the MQ intensities distribution are linear in time. The criteria of such behavior, called weak irreversibility, are formulated. The proposed approach can be extended beyond spin systems, in order to analyze some general aspects of reversibility of many-body quantum dynamics.