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arXiv:2211.03725 · Physical review. B./Physical review. B

Hydrodynamic relaxation of spin helices

Guillaume Cecile, Sarang Gopalakrishnan, Romain Vasseur, Jacopo De Nardis

Published Aug 16, 2023• 7 citations
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Abstract

Motivated by recent cold-atom experiments, we study the relaxation of spin helices in quantum XXZ spin chains. The experimentally observed relaxation of spin helices follows scaling laws that are qualitatively different from linear-response transport. We construct a theory of the relaxation of such spin helices, combining generalized hydrodynamics with diffusive corrections and a generalized form of the local density approximation. Although helices are far from local equilibrium, our hydrodynamic approach reproduces the experimentally observed relaxational dynamics and also predicts the late-time relaxation, which is outside the experimentally accessible timescales. In particular, our theory explains the existence of temporal regimes with apparent anomalous diffusion, as well as the asymmetry between positive and negative anisotropy regimes at short and intermediate times.

DOI
10.1103/physrevb.108.075135

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Motivated by recent cold-atom experiments, we study the relaxation of spin helices in quantum XXZ spin chains. The experimentally observed relaxation of spin helices follows scaling laws that are qualitatively different from linear-response transport. We construct a theory of the relaxation of such spin helices, combining generalized hydrodynamics with diffusive corrections and a generalized form of the local density approximation. Although helices are far from local equilibrium, our hydrodynamic approach reproduces the experimentally observed relaxational dynamics and also predicts the late-time relaxation, which is outside the experimentally accessible timescales. In particular, our theory explains the existence of temporal regimes with apparent anomalous diffusion, as well as the asymmetry between positive and negative anisotropy regimes at short and intermediate times.
We describe the dynamics of a transverse spin-helix state---a product state with spatially rotating magnetization---under XXZ spin chain evolution. Due to experimental relevance we especially focus on magnetization dynamics. At long times the U(1)U(1)U(1) symmetry of the Hamiltonian is restored, leading to the decay of transverse magnetization, which can be described as an exponential decay of a spatially harmonic profile. We show that the dependence of the short- and intermediate-time decay timescale, which in principle depends on all different parameters, like the wave vector of the initial helix, the anisotropy, etc., can be described well by a single scaling function. We also briefly discuss the evolution of magnetization current.
We compute the spin-structure factor of XXZ spin chains in the Heisenberg and gapped (Ising) regimes in the high-temperature limit for nonzero magnetization, within the framework of generalized hydrodynamics, including diffusive corrections. The structure factor shows a hierarchy of timescales in the gapped phase, owing to s-spin magnon bound states ("strings") of various sizes. Although short strings move ballistically, long strings move primarily diffusively as a result of their collisions with short strings. The interplay between these effects gives rise to anomalous power-law decay of the spin-structure factor, with continuously varying exponents, at any fixed separation in the late-time limit. We elucidate the cross-over to diffusion (in the gapped phase) and to superdiffusion (at the isotropic point) in the half-filling limit. We verify our results via extensive matrix product operator calculations.
Many experimentally relevant quantum spin chains are approximately integrable, and support long-lived quasiparticle excitations. A canonical example of integrable model of quantum magnetism is the XXZ spin chain, for which energy spreads ballistically, but, surprisingly, spin transport can be diffusive or superdiffusive. We review the transport properties of this model using an intuitive quasiparticle picture that relies on the recently introduced framework of generalized hydrodynamics. We discuss how anomalous linear response properties emerge from hierarchies of quasiparticles both in integrable and near-integrable limits, with an emphasis on the role of hydrodynamic fluctuations. We also comment on recent developments including non-linear response, full-counting statistics and far-from-equilibrium transport. We provide an overview of recent numerical and experimental results on transport in XXZ spin chains.
Motivated by cold-atom experiments and a desire to understand far-from-equilibrium quantum transport, we analytically study the dynamics of spin helices in the one-dimensional XX\mathit{XX}XX model. We use a Jordan-Wigner transformation to map the spin chain onto a noninteracting Fermi gas with simple equations of motion. The resulting dynamics are nontrivial, however, as the spin-helix initial condition corresponds to a highly nonequilibrium distribution of the fermions. We find a separation of timescales between the in-plane and out-of-plane spin dynamics. We gain insights from analyzing the case of a uniform spin chain and from a semiclassical model. One of our key findings is that the spin correlation functions decay as ${t}^{\ensuremath{-}1/2}$ at long time, in contrast to the experimentally observed exponential decay.
We show that hydrodynamic diffusion is generically present in many-body, one-dimensional interacting quantum and classical integrable models. We extend the recently developed generalized hydrodynamic (GHD) to include terms of Navier-Stokes type, which leads to positive entropy production and diffusive relaxation mechanisms. These terms provide the subleading diffusive corrections to Euler-scale GHD for the large-scale nonequilibrium dynamics of integrable systems, and arise due to two-body scatterings among quasiparticles. We give exact expressions for the diffusion coefficients. Our results apply to a large class of integrable models, including quantum and classical, Galilean and relativistic field theories, chains, and gases in one dimension, such as the Lieb-Liniger model describing cold atom gases and the Heisenberg quantum spin chain. We provide numerical evaluations in the Heisenberg XXZ spin chain, both for the spin diffusion constant, and for the diffusive effects during the melting of a small domain wall of spins, finding excellent agreement with time-dependent density matrix renormalization group numerical simulations.
Long-lived spin-helix states facilitate the study of non-equilibrium dynamics in quantum magnets. We consider the decay of transverse spin-helices in antiferromagnetic spin-SSS XXZ chains with single-ion anisostropy. The spin-helix decay is observable in the time evolution of the local magnetization that we calculate numerically for the system in the thermodynamic limit using infinite time-evolving block decimation simulations. Although the single-ion anisotropy prevents helix states from being eigenstates of the Hamiltonian, they still can be long-lived for appropriately chosen wave numbers. In case of an easy-axis exchange anisotropy the single-ion anisotropy may even stabilize the helices. Within a spin-wave approximation, we obtain a condition giving an estimate for the most stable wave number QQQ that agrees qualitatively with our numerical results.