The description of nonequilibrium dynamics in interacting quantum systems is a long-standing challenge within condensed matter physics. In this theoretical work, the authors introduce a method to block-diagonalize low-energy sectors of strongly interacting Hamiltonians by variationally computing generators of rotations, equivalent to a nonperturbative dressing of quasiparticle excitations. This procedure allows for the calculation of effective dynamics including quenches and response functions, as is demonstrated in a Fermi-Hubbard model and an integrability-broken XY model, both of which demonstrate excellent convergence.
The description of nonequilibrium dynamics in interacting quantum systems is a long-standing challenge within condensed matter physics. In this theoretical work, the authors introduce a method to block-diagonalize low-energy sectors of strongly interacting Hamiltonians by variationally computing generators of rotations, equivalent to a nonperturbative dressing of quasiparticle excitations. This procedure allows for the calculation of effective dynamics including quenches and response functions, as is demonstrated in a Fermi-Hubbard model and an integrability-broken XY model, both of which demonstrate excellent convergence.
Simulating the nonequilibrium behavior of interacting quantum systems is an important way to understand results of experimental quantum simulators, motivate new materials, and refine new quantum algorithms. However, this is a challenging task due to the exponential difficulty of such systems, which motivates dimensional reduction methods, such as semiclassical limits. This work extends semiclassical phase space methods to spin systems with no clear classical limit with the cluster truncated Wigner approximation (cTWA), and improves on Schrieffer-Wolff low energy effective dynamics with variational adiabatic generators. The cTWA was used to compute nonequilibrium dynamics in spin chains, finding behavior such as signatures of many body localization; rapid thermalization and preservation of fluctuations; effective thermodynamic classical behaviors; and signatures of quantum chaos and butterfly velocities, in 1d spin 1/2 chains. Variational Schrieffer-Wolff methods were used to find efficient non-perturbative dressings for the Hubbard model and find effective quasiparticle dynamics and nonthermal states in quantum chaotic spin chains. These methods are potentially effective tools to separate essential quantum behavior from classical behavior, and can be used to diagnose quantum thermalization behavior in interacting quantum systems.
Schrieffer-Wolff transformation is extensively used in quantum many-body physics to calculate the low energy effective Hamiltonian. It offers a perturbative method to understand the renormalization effects in the strong coupling regime of the quantum many-body models. The generator for Schrieffer-Wolff transformation is calculated using heuristic methods. It is highly desirable to have a rigorous, systematic and simple method for the calculation of generator for this highly important transformation. In this paper, we put forward such a method. We demonstrate our method by applying it to few well-known models from various fields like strongly correlated electron systems, quantum optics and cavity quantum electrodynamics. Our method can be applied to a broad class of quantum many-body Hamiltonians.
This paper explores the numerical study of quantum many-body systems with an emphasis on exact diagonalization techniques. The complexity of strongly correlated systems, often governed by large Hilbert spaces, presents significant computational challenges, making exact solutions difficult. In this work, we examine methods to simplify these systems by leveraging techniques such as the Schrieffer-Wolff transformation, which decouples high-energy and low-energy states, and the use of symmetry operators to block-diagonalize Hamiltonians and so on. These approaches are demonstrated with examples such as the hydrogen atom and a lambda system. The second part of the paper focuses on specific case studies, including a one-dimensional spin model and Bose-Hubbard model. The latter is crucial for understanding the behavior of interacting bosons in lattice systems and phenomena such as the superfluid-Mott insulator transition. We present a detailed investigation of the phase diagram for the one-dimensional Bose-Hubbard model using both exact diagonalization and mean field theory, providing insights into its quantum phase transitions. This study underscores the potential of exact diagonalization in quantum simulations and highlights its relevance for experimental setups involving trapped ions and superconducting qubits.
In strongly interacting systems with a separation of energy scales, low-energy effective Hamiltonians help provide insights into the relevant physics at low temperatures. The emergent interactions in the effective model are mediated by virtual excitations of high-energy states: For example, virtual doublon-hole excitations in the Fermi-Hubbard model mediate antiferromagnetic spin-exchange interactions in the derived effective model, known as the $t\ensuremath{-}J\ensuremath{-}3s$ model. Formally this procedure is described by performing a unitary Schrieffer-Wolff basis transformation. In the context of quantum simulation, it can be advantageous to consider the effective model to interpret experimental results. However, virtual excitations such as doublon-hole pairs can obfuscate the measurement of physical observables. Here we show that quantum simulators allow one to access the effective model even more directly by performing measurements in a rotated basis. We propose a protocol to perform a Schrieffer-Wolff transformation on Fermi-Hubbard low-energy eigenstates (or thermal states) to dynamically prepare approximate $t\ensuremath{-}J\ensuremath{-}3s$ model states using fermionic atoms in an optical lattice. Our protocol involves performing a linear ramp of the optical lattice depth, which is slow enough to eliminate the virtual doublon-hole fluctuations but fast enough to freeze out the dynamics in the effective model. We perform a numerical study using exact diagonalization and find an optimal ramp speed for which the state after the lattice ramp has maximal overlap with the $t\ensuremath{-}J\ensuremath{-}3s$ model state. We compare our numerics to experimental data from our Lithium-6 fermionic quantum gas microscope and show a proof-of-principle demonstration of this protocol. More generally, this protocol can be beneficial to studies of effective models by enabling the suppression of virtual excitations in a wide range of quantum simulation experiments.
We present a numerical, non-perturbative framework for constructing effective Hamiltonians that describe the dynamics of low-energy degrees of freedom within a restricted Hilbert space in quantum many-body systems. The approach is based on block diagonalization guided by a minimal-deformation principle imposed within a selected target sector. The formulation is designed to remain compatible with the numerical linked-cluster expansion. For gapped systems, the relation between minimal deformation and cluster additivity requires careful treatment when excited eigenstates contain finite admixtures of the ground state. After establishing a cluster-additive basis that reproduces the Hörmann-Schmidt construction, the minimal-deformation criterion uniquely determines the effective Hamiltonian within each excitation sector. The same criterion also provides a practical numerical procedure for selecting relevant low-energy eigenstates, including regimes characterized by strong level mixing and avoided crossings. The framework is illustrated using two spin models: the one-dimensional transverse-field Ising model as a benchmark and the two-dimensional Shastry-Sutherland model with Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interactions, relevant to SrCu _2 2 (BO _3 3 ) _2 2 . In both cases, the resulting effective Hamiltonians accurately capture the excitation dynamics and the associated band structures.
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.