Quantum impurity models (QIMs) are ubiquitous throughout physics. As simplified toy models they provide crucial insights for understanding more complicated strongly correlated systems, while in their own right are accurate descriptions of many experimental platforms. In equilibrium, their physics is well understood and have proven a testing ground for many powerful theoretical tools, both numerical and analytical, in use today. Their nonequilibrium physics is much less studied and understood. However, the recent advancements in nonequilibrium integrable quantum systems through the development of generalized hydrodynamics (GHD) coupled with the fact that many archetypal QIMs are in fact integrable presents an enticing opportunity to enhance our understanding of these systems. We take a step towards this by expanding the framework of GHD to incorporate integrable interacting QIMs. We present a set of Bethe-Boltzmann type equations which incorporate the effects of impurity scattering and discuss the new aspects which include entropy production. These impurity GHD equations are then used to study a bipartioning quench wherein a relevant backscattering impurity is included at the location of the bipartition. The density and current profiles are studied as a function of the impurity strength and expressions for the entanglement entropy and full counting statistics are derived.
Quantum impurity models (QIMs) are ubiquitous throughout physics. As simplified toy models they provide crucial insights for understanding more complicated strongly correlated systems, while in their own right are accurate descriptions of many experimental platforms. In equilibrium, their physics is well understood and have proven a testing ground for many powerful theoretical tools, both numerical and analytical, in use today. Their nonequilibrium physics is much less studied and understood. However, the recent advancements in nonequilibrium integrable quantum systems through the development of generalized hydrodynamics (GHD) coupled with the fact that many archetypal QIMs are in fact integrable presents an enticing opportunity to enhance our understanding of these systems. We take a step towards this by expanding the framework of GHD to incorporate integrable interacting QIMs. We present a set of Bethe-Boltzmann type equations which incorporate the effects of impurity scattering and discuss the new aspects which include entropy production. These impurity GHD equations are then used to study a bipartioning quench wherein a relevant backscattering impurity is included at the location of the bipartition. The density and current profiles are studied as a function of the impurity strength and expressions for the entanglement entropy and full counting statistics are derived.
Understanding the general principles underlying strongly interacting quantum states out of equilibrium is one of the most important tasks of current theoretical physics.With experiments accessing the intricate dynamics of many-body quantum systems, it is paramount to develop powerful methods that encode the emergent physics.Up to now, the strong dichotomy observed between integrable and nonintegrable evolutions made an overarching theory difficult to build, especially for transport phenomena where spacetime profiles are drastically different.We present a novel framework for studying transport in integrable systems: hydrodynamics with infinitely many conservation laws.This bridges the conceptual gap between integrable and nonintegrable quantum dynamics, and gives powerful tools for accurate studies of spacetime profiles.We apply it to the description of energy transport between heat baths, and provide a full description of the current-carrying nonequilibrium steady state and the transition regions in a family of models including the Lieb-Liniger model of interacting Bose gases, realized in experiments.
Physical systems made of many interacting quantum particles can often be described by Euler hydrodynamic equations in the limit of long wavelengths and low frequencies. Recently such a classical hydrodynamic framework, now dubbed generalized hydrodynamics (GHD), was found for quantum integrable models in one spatial dimension. Despite its great predictive power, GHD, like any Euler hydrodynamic equation, misses important quantum effects, such as quantum fluctuations leading to nonzero equal-time correlations between fluid cells at different positions. Focusing on the one-dimensional gas of bosons with delta repulsion, and on states of zero entropy, for which quantum fluctuations are larger, we reconstruct such quantum effects by quantizing GHD. The resulting theory of quantum GHD can be viewed as a multicomponent Luttinger liquid theory, with a small set of effective parameters that are fixed by the thermodynamic Bethe ansatz. It describes quantum fluctuations of truly nonequilibrium systems where conventional Luttinger liquid theory fails.
We study impurities in integrable models from the viewpoint of generalized hydrodynamics (GHD). An impurity can be thought of as a boundary condition for the GHD equation, relating the state on the left and right side. We find that in interacting models it is not possible to disentangle incoming and outgoing states, which means that it is not possible to think of scattering as a mapping which maps the incoming state to the outgoing state. We then introduce a novel class of impurities, dubbed mesoscopic impurities, whose spatial size is mesoscopic (i.e.\ their size Lmicro≪Limp≪L is much larger than the microscopic length scale Lmicro, but much smaller than the system size L). Due to their large size it is possible to describe mesoscopic impurities via GHD. This simplification allows one to study these impurities both analytically and numerically. These impurities show interesting non-perturbative scattering behavior, for instance non-uniqueness of solutions and a non-analytic dependence on the impurity strength. In models with one quasi-particle species and a scattering phase shift that depends on the difference of momenta only, we find that one can describe the scattering using an effective Hamiltonian. This Hamiltonian is dressed due to the interaction between particles and satisfies a self consistency fixed point equation. On the example of the hard rods model we demonstrate how this fixed point equation can be used to find explicit solutions to the scattering problem.
Abstract This study focuses on the impurities in integrable models from the viewpoint of generalized hydrodynamics (GHD). An impurity can be thought of as a boundary condition for the GHD equation, relating the states on the left and right sides. It was found that, in interacting models, it is not possible to disentangle the incoming and outgoing states, which means that it is not possible to think of scattering as a mapping that maps the incoming state to the outgoing state. A novel class of impurities, dubbed mesoscopic impurities, was then introduced, whose spatial size is mesoscopic (i.e. their size L m i c r o ≪ L i m p ≪ L is much larger than the microscopic length scale L m i c r o but much smaller than the macroscopic scale L). Because of their large size, it is possible to describe mesoscopic impurities via GHD. This simplification allows one to study these impurities both analytically and numerically. These impurities show interesting non-perturbative scattering behavior, such as the nonuniqueness of the solutions and a nonanalytic dependence on the impurity strength. In models with one quasi-particle species and a scattering phase shift that depends only on the difference in momenta, the scattering can be described using an effective Hamiltonian. This Hamiltonian is dressed due to the interaction between the particles and satisfies a self-consistency fixed-point equation. In the example of the hard-rod model, it was demonstrated how this fixed-point equation can be used to find almost explicit solutions to the scattering problem by reducing it to a two-dimensional system of equations that can be solved numerically.
We study transport dynamics of free fermions subject to the external monitoring of a conserved charge over an extensive region. Focusing on bipartition protocols, we consider monitoring the total particle number over half of the system, and study the profiles of local charges and currents at hydrodynamic scales. While the Lindbladian describing the averaged dynamics is non-local, we show that the profiles can be understood in terms of localized impurities. We present a general framework based on the generalized hydrodynamics (GHD) picture, allowing for a hybrid numerical-analytic solution of the quench dynamics at hydrodynamic scales. We illustrate our approach for domain-wall initial states, showing that monitoring leads to discontinuities in the profiles that become more pronounced as the rate increases and that lead to the absence of transport in the Zeno limit of infinite monitoring rates. Our GHD framework could be naturally extended to interacting systems, paving the way for a systematic study of transport of integrable models subject to extensive-charge measurements.
Understanding the general principles underlying strongly interacting quantum states out of equilibrium is one of the most important tasks of current theoretical physics.With experiments accessing the intricate dynamics of many-body quantum systems, it is paramount to develop powerful methods that encode the emergent physics.Up to now, the strong dichotomy observed between integrable and nonintegrable evolutions made an overarching theory difficult to build, especially for transport phenomena where spacetime profiles are drastically different.We present a novel framework for studying transport in integrable systems: hydrodynamics with infinitely many conservation laws.This bridges the conceptual gap between integrable and nonintegrable quantum dynamics, and gives powerful tools for accurate studies of spacetime profiles.We apply it to the description of energy transport between heat baths, and provide a full description of the current-carrying nonequilibrium steady state and the transition regions in a family of models including the Lieb-Liniger model of interacting Bose gases, realized in experiments.