We investigate the nonequilibrium states of an interacting multicomponent quantum system when only an extensive subsystem is quantum quenched or driven from the ground state. As a concrete example, we consider a system where two XXZ spin chains are coupled to a transverse field Ising (TFI) chain, and only the transverse field in the TFI chain is quantum quenched or periodically driven in time, starting from an initially ordered state. This system is studied using density matrix renormalization group simulations and various entanglement entropy diagnostics. In the case of quantum quenching, when the transverse field is suddenly switched on to become the largest energy scale, the resulting internal dynamics leads to a prethermal steady state with persistent oscillating magnetization (``self driving'') and emergent conservation laws. Upon applying the time-dependent drive to the TFI chain (``external driving''), sufficiently fast drive gives rise to a prethermal steady state with finite magnetization, whereas a slow drive generates a high-temperature disordered state. We briefly discuss the experimental implementation of our protocol in organic materials with quantum-tunneling hydrogen atoms.
We investigate the nonequilibrium states of an interacting multicomponent quantum system when only an extensive subsystem is quantum quenched or driven from the ground state. As a concrete example, we consider a system where two XXZ spin chains are coupled to a transverse field Ising (TFI) chain, and only the transverse field in the TFI chain is quantum quenched or periodically driven in time, starting from an initially ordered state. This system is studied using density matrix renormalization group simulations and various entanglement entropy diagnostics. In the case of quantum quenching, when the transverse field is suddenly switched on to become the largest energy scale, the resulting internal dynamics leads to a prethermal steady state with persistent oscillating magnetization (self driving'') and emergent conservation laws. Upon applying the time-dependent drive to the TFI chain (external driving''), sufficiently fast drive gives rise to a prethermal steady state with finite magnetization, whereas a slow drive generates a high-temperature disordered state. We briefly discuss the experimental implementation of our protocol in organic materials with quantum-tunneling hydrogen atoms.
We study prethermal time quasicrystalline (TQC) order in a quasiperiodically driven chain of non-interacting spin-1/2 particles. The drive consists of two parts, switched on and off periodically with frequency ωd: (i) disordered Ising interactions, with exchange couplings chosen from a symmetric interval [−J/2,J/2], allowing random antiferromagnetic or ferromagnetic nearest-neighbor couplings, together with a random transverse field; and (ii) a rotating transverse magnetic field with frequency Ω. The ratio ωd/Ω is chosen to be irrational, producing multiple incommensurate frequencies and yielding quasiperiodic dynamics beyond Floquet theory. Using exact diagonalization, we analyze the time autocorrelation function, dynamical structure factor, and entanglement entropy (EE). In the high-frequency regime, robust spectral peaks at incommensurate frequencies (not integer multiples of the fundamental drives) signal quasiperiodic time-translation symmetry breaking (QTTSB). The EE exhibits sublinear power-law growth followed by a prethermal plateau, indicating suppressed resonant heating due to an energy scale mismatch. The nonequilibrium lifetime increases rapidly with driving frequency. Unlike symmetric disorder sampling, an asymmetric distribution of the Ising exchange couplings induces collective spin rigidity, enhancing the system's resistance to heating. The TQC phase remains stable against next-nearest-neighbor (NNN) exchange perturbations and rotational imperfections, with robustness comparable to discrete time crystals (TCs) under periodic driving. Our results establish this quasiperiodically driven system as a platform for long-lived nonequilibrium temporal order, revealing the interplay of disorder, collective rigidity, and quasiperiodic driving.
We consider the nonequilibrium dynamics arising after a quench of the transverse magnetic field of a quantum Ising chain, together with the sudden switch-on of a long-range interaction term. The dynamics after the quantum quench is mapped onto a fully connected model of hard-core bosons, after a suitable combination of a Holstein-Primakoff transformation and of a low-density expansion in the quasiparticles injected by the quench. This mapping holds for a broad class of initial states and for quenches which do not cross the critical point of the transverse field Ising model. We then study the algebraic relaxation in time of a number of observables towards a metastable, prethermal state, which becomes the asymptotic steady state in the thermodynamic limit.
In this thesis, we study the properties of the transverse field Ising (TFI) chain in several non-equilibrium setups. One such setup is finite-time quantum quench—quench in which a Hamiltonian parameter is continuously changed during a finite-time, as opposed to the usual instantaneous change in the sudden quenches. A different type of quantum quench, which does not involve changing a Hamiltonian parameter, can be realised by the so-called partitioning protocol. In this protocol, two independent chains are prepared at different temperatures and then coupled into a single system and evolved as such. Another possibility to take the system out of equilibrium is to introduce a driving—for example, by suddenly and continuously changing a Hamiltonian parameter over long times. We discuss the general treatment of each of these situations, and apply them to several quench and driving protocols in the TFI chain. We analyse the behaviour of several observables, such as the total energy, spin correlation functions and Loschmidt echo, during and after quenches and during driving. While we choose the specific protocols to display the dependence of observables on the protocol features, we also investigate the universal behaviours of the observables in the late-time limit. Isolated quenched TFI chains do not relax at late times, however, local observables in these systems do—they relax to a special stationary state described by the generalised Gibbs ensemble (GGE). A similar situation happens in the case of periodic driving of the TFI chain—the late time state of the driven TFI chain, at least as far as the local observables are concerned, it is a periodic steady state described by the periodic Gibbs ensemble (PGE). In this thesis, we observe the relaxation behaviour for various quench and driving protocols and observables. In addition to studying statistical ensembles in the context of relaxation of out-of-equilibrium systems, we describe a machine learning algorithm based on the generalised Gibbs ensemble. We first describe a traditional machine learning algorithm, the Boltzmann machine, and its quantum version. Based on our knowledge of the relaxation of the out-of-equilibrium TFI chain, we modify the existing Boltzmann machine algorithm to include the many GGE charges and test it on the commonly used MNIST dataset. Rather than learning a complicated energy function and using the Boltzmann distribution, we then use the relatively simple TFI Hamiltonian and learn the effective temperatures of the GGE and find reasonably low error rates, while learning a comparatively low number of parameters.
To create a more comprehensive understanding of nonequilibrium dynamics of open quantum many-body systems, we visit an exactly solvable example, that is a quenched transverse-field Ising chain coupled to Markovian baths, which act locally on the Jordan-Wigner fermionic space. Performing explicit calculations on the heat transfer, transverse magnetization, and kink density, we find that the imbalance of two opposite damping mechanisms play a crucial role in constructing a nontrivial nonequilibrium steady state accompanied with a dissipative quantum phase transition, also that the competition between unitary drive and decoherence does not necessarily lead to a quasi-stationary state or prethermalization under certain ordinary relaxation.
Although statistical mechanics describes thermal equilibrium states, these states may or may not emerge dynamically for a subsystem of an isolated quantum many-body system. For instance, quantum systems that are near-integrable usually fail to thermalize in an experimentally realistic time scale, and instead relax to quasi-stationary prethermal states that can be described by statistical mechanics, when approximately conserved quantities are included in a generalized Gibbs ensemble (GGE). We experimentally study the relaxation dynamics of a chain of up to 22 spins evolving under a long-range transverse-field Ising Hamiltonian following a sudden quench. For sufficiently long-range interactions, the system relaxes to a new type of prethermal state that retains a strong memory of the initial conditions. However, the prethermal state in this case cannot be described by a standard GGE; it rather arises from an emergent double-well potential felt by the spin excitations. This result shows that prethermalization occurs in a broader context than previously thought, and reveals new challenges for a generic understanding of the thermalization of quantum systems, particularly in the presence of long-range interactions.
This work presents a theoretical investigation of dynamic stabilization in interacting quantum many-body systems via high-frequency periodic driving. Using Floquet theory and the Magnus expansion, we derive the effective time-independent Hamiltonian governing the slow dynamics of a driven spin chain. We show that the external field induces a parametric renormalization of the transverse tunneling terms through a zeroth-order Bessel function dependence, leading to a critical drive amplitude at which transport is strongly suppressed. This suppression of the lowest-order hopping term gives rise to a long-lived prethermal regime in which many-body thermalization is significantly delayed. The resulting dynamics exhibit a sharp reduction in the short-to-intermediate time entanglement entropy growth rate. The framework is consistent with known results in Floquet engineering and coherent destruction of tunneling, and provides a unified interpretation of transport suppression and delayed scrambling in periodically driven systems. A falsifiable experimental protocol using ultracold atoms in optical lattices is proposed to validate the predicted threshold behavior and prethermal stabilization mechanism.