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arXiv:2201.03536 · Nature Communications

Quantum wake dynamics in Heisenberg antiferromagnetic chains

Allen O. Scheie, Pontus Laurell, B. Lake, S. E. Nagler, M. B. Stone, Jean-Sébastien Caux, D. M. Tennant

Published Oct 2, 2022• 17 citations
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Abstract

Traditional spectroscopy, by its very nature, characterizes physical system properties in the momentum and frequency domains. However, the most interesting and potentially practically useful quantum many-body effects emerge from local, short-time correlations. Here, using inelastic neutron scattering and methods of integrability, we experimentally observe and theoretically describe a local, coherent, long-lived, quasiperiodically oscillating magnetic state emerging out of the distillation of propagating excitations following a local quantum quench in a Heisenberg antiferromagnetic chain. This "quantum wake" displays similarities to Floquet states, discrete time crystals and nonlinear Luttinger liquids. We also show how this technique reveals the non-commutativity of spin operators, and is thus a model-agnostic measure of a magnetic system's "quantumness."

DOI
10.1038/s41467-022-33571-8

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Traditional spectroscopy, by its very nature, characterizes physical system properties in the momentum and frequency domains. However, the most interesting and potentially practically useful quantum many-body effects emerge from local, short-time correlations. Here, using inelastic neutron scattering and methods of integrability, we experimentally observe and theoretically describe a local, coherent, long-lived, quasiperiodically oscillating magnetic state emerging out of the distillation of propagating excitations following a local quantum quench in a Heisenberg antiferromagnetic chain. This "quantum wake" displays similarities to Floquet states, discrete time crystals and nonlinear Luttinger liquids. We also show how this technique reveals the non-commutativity of spin operators, and is thus a model-agnostic measure of a magnetic system's "quantumness."
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A recent experiment on a 51-atom Rydberg-blockaded chain observed anomalously long-lived temporal oscillations of local observables after quenching from an antiferromagnetic initial state. This coherence is surprising as the initial state should have thermalized rapidly to infinite temperature. In this Rapid Communication, we show that the experimental Hamiltonian exhibits nonthermal behavior across its entire many-body spectrum, with similar finite-size scaling properties as models proximate to integrable points. Moreover, we construct an explicit small local deformation of the Hamiltonian which enhances both the signatures of integrability and the coherent oscillations observed after the quench. Our results suggest that a parent proximate integrable point controls the early-to-intermediate time dynamics of the experimental system. The distinctive quench dynamics in the parent model could signal an unconventional class of integrable system.
We consider the nonequilibrium evolution in the spin-1/2 XXZ Heisenberg chain for fixed magnetization after a local quantum quench. This model is equivalent to interacting spinless fermions. Initially an infinite magnetic field is applied to n consecutive sites and the ground state is calculated. At time t=0 the field is switched off and the time evolution of observables such as the z component of spin is computed using the time evolving block decimation algorithm. We find that the observables exhibit strong signatures of linearly propagating spinon and bound state excitations. These persist even when integrability-breaking perturbations are included. Since bound states ("strings") are notoriously difficult to observe using conventional probes such as inelastic neutron scattering, we conclude that local quantum quenches are an ideal setting for studying their properties. We comment on implications of our results for cold atom experiments.
The elementary excitations of quantum spin systems have generally the nature of weakly interacting bosonic quasiparticles, generated by local operators acting on the ground state. Nonetheless in one spatial dimension the nature of the quasiparticles can change radically, since many relevant one-dimensional S=1/2S=1/2S=1/2 Hamiltonians can be exactly mapped onto models of spinless fermions with local hopping and interactions. Due to the nonlocal nature of the spin-to-fermion mapping, observing directly the fermionic quasiparticle excitations is impossible using local probes, which are at the basis of all the forms of spectroscopy (such as neutron scattering) traditionally available in condensed-matter physics. Here, we show theoretically that quench spectroscopy for synthetic quantum matter---which probes the excitation spectrum of a system by monitoring the nonequilibrium dynamics of its correlation functions---can reconstruct accurately the dispersion relation of fermionic quasiparticles in spin chains. This possibility relies on the ability of quantum simulation experiments to measure nonlocal spin-spin correlation functions, corresponding to elementary fermionic correlation functions. Our analysis is based on exact results for the quench dynamics of quantum spin chains, and it opens the path to probe arbitrary quasiparticle excitations in synthetic quantum matter.
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The excitations of the Heisenberg antiferromagnetic spin chain in zero field are known as spinons. As pairwise-created fractionalized excitations, spinons are important in the understanding of inelastic neutron scattering experiments in (quasi-)one-dimensional materials. In the present paper, we consider the real space-time dynamics of spinons originating from a local spin flip on the antiferromagnetic ground state of the (an)isotropic Heisenberg spin-1/2 model and the Babujan-Takhtajan spin-1 model. By utilizing algebraic Bethe ansatz methods at finite system size to compute the expectation value of the local magnetization and spin-spin correlations, spinons are visualized as propagating domain walls in the antiferromagnetic spin ordering with anisotropy dependent behavior. The spin-spin correlation after the spin flip displays a light cone, satisfying the Lieb-Robinson bound for the propagation of correlations at the spinon velocity.