By tightening the conventional Lieb-Robinson bounds to better handle systems that lack translation invariance, we determine the extent to which "weak links" suppress operator growth in disordered onedimensional spin chains.In particular, we prove that ballistic growth is impossible when the distribution of coupling strengths μ(J ) has a sufficiently heavy tail at small J and we identify the correct dynamical exponent to use instead.Furthermore, through a detailed analysis of the special case in which the couplings are genuinely random and independent, we find that the standard formulation of Lieb-Robinson bounds is insufficient to capture the complexity of the dynamics-we must distinguish between bounds that hold for all sites of the chain and bounds that hold for a subsequence of sites and we show by explicit example that these two can have dramatically different behaviors.All the same, our result for the dynamical exponent is tight, in that we prove by counterexample that there cannot exist any Lieb-Robinson bound with a smaller exponent.We close by discussing the implications of our results, both major and minor, for numerous applications ranging from quench dynamics to the structure of ground states.
An active area of research in quantum many-body physics is the extent to which quenched disorder impedes ``natural'' behaviors, such as transport and thermalization. This is an inherently challenging problem to study, and thus it is particularly valuable to have rigorous results that unambiguously prove the absence of transport in certain situations. This work provides such a result: the author uses here the machinery of Lieb-Robinson bounds to prove that ballistic and even diffusive motion is indeed impossible when the distribution of on-site disorder is sufficiently heavy tailed, regardless of most other details of the Hamiltonian.
Lieb-Robinson bounds quantify the maximal speed of information spreading in nonrelativistic quantum systems.We discuss the relation of Lieb-Robinson bounds to out-of-time order correlators, which correspond to different norms of commutators C(r, t ) = [A i (t ), B i+r ] of local operators.Using an exact Krylov space-time evolution technique, we calculate these two different norms of such commutators for the spin-1/2 Heisenberg chain with interactions decaying as a power law 1/r α with distance r.Our numerical analysis shows that both norms (operator norm and normalized Frobenius norm) exhibit the same asymptotic behavior, namely, a linear growth in time at short times and a power-law decay in space at long distance, leading asymptotically to power-law light cones for α < 1 and to linear light cones for α > 1.The asymptotic form of the tails of C(r, t ) ∝ t/r α is described by short-time perturbation theory, which is valid at short times and long distances.
This dissertation presents new results on two problems concerning the dynamics of certainclasses of interacting many-body systems in quantum mechanics. Chapter 1 is an introduction,\nwhich includes mathematical preliminaries and a summary of the results.\nIn Chapter 2 we introduce the notion of transmission time to study the dynamics of disordered\nquantum spin chains and prove results relating its behavior to many-body localization properties.\nWe also study two versions of the so-called Local Integrals of Motion (LIOM) representation of\nspin chain Hamiltonians and their relation to dynamical many-body localization. We prove that\nuniform-in-time dynamical localization expressed by a zero-velocity Lieb-Robinson bound implies\nthe existence of a LIOM representation of the dynamics as well as a weak converse of this statement.\nWe also prove that for a class of spin chains satisfying a form of exponential dynamical localization,\nsparse perturbations result in a dynamics in which transmission times diverge at least as a power\nlaw of distance, with a power for which we provide lower bound that diverges with increasing\nsparseness of the perturbation.\nIn Chapter 3 we introduce a class of UV-regularized two-body interactions for fermions in Rd\nand prove a Lieb-Robinson estimate for the dynamics of this class of many-body systems. As a\nstep toward this result, we also prove a propagation bound of Lieb-Robinson type for Schrodinger\noperators. We apply the propagation bound to prove the existence of infnite-volume dynamics as\na strongly continuous group of automorphisms on the CAR algebra.
We study the effect of anisotropy of spin-
S impurities on an antiferromagnetic SU(2) Heisenberg chain. The magnetic impurities are assumed to have an XXZ-type anisotropic exchange with their neighboring sites. First, using density-matrix renormalization group technique, we examine spin-spin correlation function, instability of N\'eel order, and local spin susceptibility in the presence of a single spin-
S impurity. Based on the results, we find that the types of spin-
S impurities are classified into two groups: (i) nonmagnetic and
S=1 impurities enhance only short-range antiferromagnetic correlation and (ii)
S=21 and
S>1 impurities can, in contrast, stabilize a long-range N\'eel order in the disordered SU(2) Heisenberg chain. Then, we focus on the case of
S=21 impurity as a representative of (ii) and investigate the evolution of some experimentally observable quantities such as magnetization, specific heat, and magnetic susceptibility, as a function of concentration and XXZ anisotropy strength of the impurity. We confirm that the N\'eel order is induced in the bulk spin chain in the presence of finite amount of easy-axis XXZ
S=21 impurities. Furthermore, we recover some of the aforementioned features using cluster mean-field theory, which allows us to present results on experimentally accessible quantities at finite temperatures. Interestingly, in the presence of uniform magnetic field, the total magnetization exhibits a pseudogap behavior for low values of applied field. We also discuss the dependence of NMR spectrum on various XXZ impurities and identify that the spin state of Co impurity in
SrCu0.99Co0.01O2 is
S=23.
In the framework of the exactly solvable model, using nonperturbative methods, the temperature and magnetic field behavior of the NMR relaxation rate (and low-energy dynamical structure factor) for the antiferromagnetic Heisenberg spin-1/2 chain with magnetic impurities is calculated. For a single magnetic impurity, totally screened at low temperatures by spinons of the chain, the critical exponents, which determine the low-temperature and magnetic field behavior, get renormalized. For the finite concentration of impurities with the random distribution of the impurity-chain coupling the weak disorder in the distribution does not produce essential changes to the dynamical structure factor. Contrary, the strong disorder yields drastically different behavior of the low-energy dynamical characteristics, comparing to the homogeneous chain. Our results are generic, and they qualitatively agree in limiting cases with the results of perturbative calculations for disordered spin chains and with the data of experiments on quasi-one-dimensional spin compounds.