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arXiv:1803.07479 · Physical review. B./Physical review. B

Hydrodynamical phase transition for domain-wall melting in the XY chain

Viktor Eisler, Florian Maislinger

Published Oct 22, 2018• 40 citations
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Abstract

We study the melting of a domain wall, prepared as a certain low-energy excitation above the ferromagnetic ground state of the XY chain. In a well-defined parameter regime the time-evolved magnetization profile develops sharp kinklike structures in the bulk, showing features of a phase transition in the hydrodynamic scaling limit. The transition is of a purely dynamical nature and can be attributed to the appearance of a negative effective mass term in the dispersion. The signatures are also clearly visible in the entanglement profile measured along the front region, which can be obtained by covariance-matrix methods despite the state being non-Gaussian.

DOI
10.1103/physrevb.98.161117

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We study the melting of a domain wall, prepared as a certain low-energy excitation above the ferromagnetic ground state of the XY chain. In a well-defined parameter regime the time-evolved magnetization profile develops sharp kinklike structures in the bulk, showing features of a phase transition in the hydrodynamic scaling limit. The transition is of a purely dynamical nature and can be attributed to the appearance of a negative effective mass term in the dispersion. The signatures are also clearly visible in the entanglement profile measured along the front region, which can be obtained by covariance-matrix methods despite the state being non-Gaussian.
We study the time evolution of magnetization and entanglement for initial states with local excitations, created upon the ferromagnetic ground state of the XY chain. For excitations corresponding to a single or two well separated domain walls, the magnetization profile has a simple hydrodynamic limit, which has a standard interpretation in terms of quasiparticles. In contrast, for a spin-flip we obtain an interference term, which has to do with the nonlocality of the excitation in the fermionic basis. Surprisingly, for the single domain wall the hydrodynamic limit of the entropy and magnetization profiles are found to be directly related. Furthermore, the entropy profile is additive for the double domain wall, whereas in case of the spin-flip excitation one has a nontrivial behaviour.
Abstract We revisit the out-of-equilibrium physics arising during the unitary evolution of a one-dimensional XXZ spin chain initially prepared in a domain wall state ∣ψ0⟩=∣⋯↑↑↓↓… ⟩\vert \psi _0\rangle =\vert \dots \uparrow \uparrow \downarrow \downarrow \dots \rangle∣ψ0​⟩=∣⋯↑↑↓↓…⟩ | ψ 0 ⟩ = | ⋯ ↑ ↑ ↓ ↓ ⋯ ⟩ . In absence of interactions, we review the exact lattice calculation of several conserved quantities, including e.g. the magnetization and the spin current profiles. At large distances x and times t, we show how these quantities allow for a ballistic scaling behavior in terms of the scaling variable ζ=x/t\zeta = x/tζ=x/t ζ = x / t , with exactly computable scaling functions. In such a limit of large space-time scales, we show that the asymptotic behavior of the system is suitably captured by the local occupation function of spinless fermionic modes, whose semi-classical evolution in phase space is given by a Euler hydrodynamic equation. Similarly, analytical results for the asymptotic fronts dynamics are obtained for the interacting chain via Generalized Hydrodynamics. In the last part of the work, we include large-scale quantum fluctuations on top of the semi-classical hydrodynamic background in the form of a conformal field theory that lives along the evolving Fermi contour. With this procedure, dubbed quantum generalized hydrodynamics, it is possible to obtain exact asymptotic results for the entanglement spreading during the melting dynamics.
We study the melting of domain walls in the ferromagnetic phase of the transverse Ising chain, created by flipping the order-parameter spins along one-half of the chain. If the initial state is excited by a local operator in terms of Jordan-Wigner fermions, the resulting longitudinal magnetization profiles have a universal character. Namely, after proper rescalings, the profiles in the noncritical Ising chain become identical to those obtained for a critical free-fermion chain starting from a step-like initial state. The relation holds exactly in the entire ferromagnetic phase of the Ising chain and can even be extended to the zero-field XY model by a duality argument. In contrast, for domain-wall excitations that are highly non-local in the fermionic variables, the universality of the magnetization profiles is lost. Nevertheless, for both cases we observe that the entanglement entropy asymptotically saturates at the ground-state value, suggesting a simple form of the steady state.
Abstract We study the unitary time evolution of the entanglement Hamiltonian of a free Fermi lattice gas in one dimension initially prepared in a domain wall configuration. To this aim, we exploit the recent development of quantum fluctuating hydrodynamics. Our findings for the entanglement Hamiltonian are based on the effective field theory description of the domain wall melting and are expected to exactly describe the Euler scaling limit of the lattice gas. However, such field theoretical results can be recovered from high-precision numerical lattice calculations only when summing appropriately over all the hoppings up to distant sites.
In spin chains with local unitary evolution preserving the magnetization Sz{S}^{\mathrm{z}}Sz, the domain-wall state $\left|\ensuremath{\cdots}\ensuremath{\uparrow}\ensuremath{\uparrow}\ensuremath{\uparrow}\ensuremath{\uparrow}\ensuremath{\uparrow}\ensuremath{\downarrow}\ensuremath{\downarrow}\ensuremath{\downarrow}\ensuremath{\downarrow}\ensuremath{\downarrow}\ensuremath{\cdots}\right\ensuremath{\rangle}$ typically ``melts.'' At large times, a nontrivial magnetization profile develops in an expanding region around the initial position of the domain wall. For nonintegrable dynamics, the melting is diffusive, with entropy production within a melted region of size t\sqrt{t}t​. In contrast, when the evolution is integrable, ballistic transport dominates and results in a melted region growing linearly in time, with no extensive entropy production: The spin chain remains locally in states of zero entropy at any time. Here we show that, for the integrable spin-1/21/21/2 XXZ chain, low-energy quantum fluctuations in the melted region give rise to an emergent Luttinger liquid which, remarkably, differs from the equilibrium one. The striking feature of this emergent Luttinger liquid is its quasiparticle charge (or Luttinger parameter KKK), which acquires a fractal dependence on the XXZ chain anisotropy parameter $\mathrm{\ensuremath{\Delta}}$.
We investigate the non-equilibrium dynamics of a one-dimensional spin-1/2 XXZ model at zero-temperature in the regime |\Delta|< 1 | Δ | < 1 , initially prepared in a product state with two domain walls i.e, |\downarrow\dots\downarrow\uparrow\dots\uparrow\downarrow\dots\downarrow \rangle | ↓ … ↓ ↑ … ↑ ↓ … ↓ ⟩ . At early times, the two domain walls evolve independently and only after a calculable time a non-trivial interplay between the two emerges and results in the occurrence of a split Fermi sea. For \Delta=0 Δ = 0 , we derive exact asymptotic results for the magnetization and the spin current by using a semi-classical Wigner function approach, and we exactly determine the spreading of entanglement entropy exploiting the recently developed tools of quantum fluctuating hydrodynamics. In the interacting case, we analytically solve the Generalized Hydrodynamics equation providing exact expressions for the conserved quantities. We display some numerical results for the entanglement entropy also in the interacting case and we propose a conjecture for its asymptotic value.