The complexity of interacting quantum many-body systems leads to exceedingly long recurrence times of the initial quantum state for all but the smallest systems. For large systems, one cannot probe the full quantum state in all its details. Thus, experimentally, recurrences can only be determined on the level of the accessible observables. Realizing a commensurate spectrum of collective excitations in one-dimensional superfluids, we demonstrate recurrences of coherence and long-range order in an interacting quantum many-body system containing thousands of particles. Our findings will enable the study of the coherent dynamics of large quantum systems even after they have reached a transient thermal-like state.
The complexity of interacting quantum many-body systems leads to exceedingly long recurrence times of the initial quantum state for all but the smallest systems. For large systems, one cannot probe the full quantum state in all its details. Thus, experimentally, recurrences can only be determined on the level of the accessible observables. Realizing a commensurate spectrum of collective excitations in one-dimensional superfluids, we demonstrate recurrences of coherence and long-range order in an interacting quantum many-body system containing thousands of particles. Our findings will enable the study of the coherent dynamics of large quantum systems even after they have reached a transient thermal-like state.
Recurrence time is evaluated for some initial quantum states in the one-dimensional Bose gas with repulsive short-range interactions. In the relatively strong and weak coupling cases some different types of initial states show almost complete recurrence and the estimates of recurrence time are proportional to some powers of the system size at least in some range of the system size. They are much longer than in the case of free particles such as 100 times. In the free-bosonic and free-fermionic regimes we evaluate the recurrence time rigorously, which is proportional to the square of the system size. The estimate of recurrence time is given by the order of ten milliseconds in the corresponding experimental systems of cold atoms trapped in one dimension of ten micrometers in length. It is much shorter than the estimate in a generic quantum many-body system, which may be as long as the age of the universe.
Gaussian models provide an excellent effective description of many quantum many-body systems ranging from condensed-matter systems1,2 all the way to neutron stars3. Gaussian states are common at equilibrium when the interactions are weak. Recently it was proposed that they can also emerge dynamically from a non-Gaussian initial state evolving under non-interacting dynamics4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11. Here we present the experimental observation of such a dynamical emergence of Gaussian correlations in a quantum many-body system. This non-equilibrium evolution is triggered by abruptly switching off the effective interaction between the observed collective degrees of freedom, while leaving the interactions between the microscopic constituents unchanged. Starting from highly non-Gaussian correlations, consistent with the sine–Gordon model12, we observe a Gaussian state emerging over time as revealed by the decay of the fourth- and sixth-order connected correlations in the quantum field. A description of this dynamics requires a novel mechanism for the emergence of Gaussian correlations, which is relevant for a wide class of quantum many-body systems. In our closed system with non-interacting effective degrees of freedom, we do not expect full thermalization13,14,15,16,17,18,19. This memory of the initial state is confirmed by observing recurrences20 of non-Gaussian correlations.
Despite being ubiquitous, out-of-equilibrium quantum systems are much less understood than systems at equilibrium. Progress in the field has benefited from a symbiotic relationship between theoretical studies and new experiments on coherent dynamics. The present work strengthens this connection by providing a general picture of the relaxation process of isolated lattice many-body quantum systems that are routinely studied in experiments with cold atoms, ions traps, and nuclear magnetic resonance. We show numerically and analytically that the long-time decay of the probability for finding the system in its initial state necessarily shows a power-law behavior ∝t−γ. This happens independently of the details of the system, such as integrability, level repulsion, and the presence or absence of disorder. Information about the spectrum, the structure of the initial state, and the number of particles that interact simultaneously is contained in the value of γ. From it, we can anticipate whether the initial state will or will not thermalize.
Despite being ubiquitous, out-of-equilibrium quantum systems are much less understood than systems at equilibrium. Progress in the field has benefited from a symbiotic relationship between theoretical studies and new experiments on coherent dynamics. The present work strengthens this connection by providing a general picture of the relaxation process of isolated lattice many-body quantum systems that are routinely studied in experiments with cold atoms, ions traps, and nuclear magnetic resonance. We show numerically and analytically that the long-time decay of the probability for finding the system in its initial state necessarily shows a power-law behavior $\ensuremath{\propto}{t}^{\ensuremath{-}\ensuremath{\gamma}}$. This happens independently of the details of the system, such as integrability, level repulsion, and the presence or absence of disorder. Information about the spectrum, the structure of the initial state, and the number of particles that interact simultaneously is contained in the value of $\ensuremath{\gamma}$. From it, we can anticipate whether the initial state will or will not thermalize.
Observables of out-of-equilibrium quantum many-body systems display complex temporal behavior that encodes the underlying physical mechanisms but typically resists straightforward interpretations. We introduce recurrence analysis - a nonlinear time-series analysis framework long established for classical dynamical systems - to investigate correlated quantum many-body dynamics. Recurrence plots provide a qualitative fingerprint of simulated or experimental data, while recurrence quantification analysis extracts corresponding numerical descriptors. Applying this framework to quenches from the paramagnetic ground state in the one-dimensional transverse-field Ising model, we observe a clear progression in the recurrence plots of two-site correlations: nearly periodic patterns in the deeply ferromagnetic phase give way to multiscale temporal structures at criticality. Recurrence quantifiers further recover the critical field strength without prior knowledge of the model, establishing recurrence analysis as a versatile tool for characterizing quantum many-body dynamics, including unsupervised detection of quantum phase transitions.
It is well-known that a dilute one-dimensional (1D) gas of bosons with infinitely strong repulsive interactions behaves like a gas of free fermions. Just as with conduction electrons in metals, we consider a single-particle picture of the resulting dynamics, when the gas is isolated by enclosing it into a box with hard walls and preparing it in a special initial state. We show, by solving the nonstationary problem of a free particle in a 1D hard-wall box, that the single-particle state recurs in time, signaling the intuitively expected back-and-forth motion of a free particle moving in a confined space. Under suitable conditions, the state of the whole gas can then be made to recur if all the particles are put in the same initial momentum superposition. We introduce this problem here as a modern instance of the discussions giving rise to the famous recurrence paradox in statistical mechanics: on one hand, our results may be used to develop a poor man's interpretation of the recurrence of the initial state observed [T. Kinoshita et al., Nature 440, 900 (2006)] in trapped 1D Bose gases of cold atoms, for which our estimated recurrence time is in fair agreement with the period of the oscillations observed; but this experiment, on the other hand, has been substantially influential on the belief that an isolated quantum many-body system can equilibrate as a consequence of its own unitary nonequilibrium dynamics. Some ideas regarding the latter are discussed.