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arXiv:2303.08801 · Physical review. B./Physical review. B

Slowest and fastest information scrambling in the strongly disordered XXZ model

Myeonghyeon Kim, DH Kim

Published Jun 22, 2023• 3 citations
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Abstract

We present a perturbation method to compute the out-of-time-ordered correlator in the strongly disordered Heisenberg XXZ model in the deep many-body localized regime. We characterize the discrete structure of the information propagation across the eigenstates, revealing a highly structured light cone confined by the strictly logarithmic upper and lower bounds representing the slowest and fastest scrambling available in this system. We explain these bounds by deriving the closed-form expression of the effective interaction for the slowest scrambling and by constructing the effective model of a half length for the fastest scrambling. We extend our lowest-order perturbation formulations to the higher dimensions, proposing that the logarithmic upper and lower light cones may persist in a finite two-dimensional system in the limit of strong disorder and weak hopping.

DOI
10.1103/physrevb.107.l220203

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We present a perturbation method to compute the out-of-time-ordered correlator in the strongly disordered Heisenberg XXZ model in the deep many-body localized regime. We characterize the discrete structure of the information propagation across the eigenstates, revealing a highly structured light cone confined by the strictly logarithmic upper and lower bounds representing the slowest and fastest scrambling available in this system. We explain these bounds by deriving the closed-form expression of the effective interaction for the slowest scrambling and by constructing the effective model of a half length for the fastest scrambling. We extend our lowest-order perturbation formulations to the higher dimensions, proposing that the logarithmic upper and lower light cones may persist in a finite two-dimensional system in the limit of strong disorder and weak hopping.
A closed quantum system never forgets its initial state, but the encoded information can get scrambled and become inaccessible without measuring a large fraction of all the system degrees of freedom. This scrambling can be diagnosed by studying the spatial spreading of initially local operators under the Heisenberg time evolution, and the decay of the out-of-time-ordered correlators (OTOC). What insights can OTOCs provide to understand the dynamics of quantum many-body systems? What are the characteristic behaviors of OTOCs during the time evolution? How is information scrambling affected by the dissipation in open quantum many-body systems? We first study slow scrambling in many-body localized systems via calculating various correlators, two-point retarded correlators and OTOCs. Comparing with retarded correlators, OTOCs provide more information about the dynamics. We find that disorder slows and partially halts the onset of information scrambling. Instead of ballistic spreading, propagation of information forms a logarithmic light cone. Next, we study the finite-size scaling of OTOCs at late times in generic thermalizing quantum many-body systems. When energy is conserved, the late-time saturation value of the OTOC of generic traceless local operators scales as an inverse polynomial in the system size. This is in contrast to the inverse exponential scaling expected for chaotic dynamics without energy conservation. We also study information scrambling in open quantum many-body systems. We define a dissipative version of OTOC and study its behaviors in a prototypical chaotic quantum chain with dissipation. We find that dissipation leads to not only the overall decay of the scrambled information due to leaking, but also structural changes so that the information light cone can only reach a finite distance even when the effect of overall decay is removed. Finally, we construct a family of local Hamiltonians for understanding the asymmetric information scrambling. Our models live on a one-dimensional lattice and exhibit asymmetric butterfly light cone between the left and right spatial directions.
Effective light cones, characterized by Lieb-Robinson bounds, emerge in nonrelativistic local quantum systems. Here, we present several analytical results derived from logarithmic light cones (LLCs). Possible origins of LLCs include the one-dimensional (1D) disordered XXZ model and a phenomenological model of many-body localization (MBL). In the LLC regime, we prove that, for arbitrary spatial dimensions and any initial pure state, entanglement growth is upper bounded by logarithmic time with an additional subleading double-logarithmic correction---arising from a real asymptotic solution of the Lambert W function---valid up to the asymptotic time limit. In the context of the 1D disordered XXZ model, this result resolves the ambiguity in distinguishing between logarithmic and power-law fits of entanglement growth in numerical studies; we also propose a falsifiable phenomenological functional form for the entanglement growth that agrees with existing numerical results. We show that information scrambling is logarithmically slow in the LLC regime. Furthermore, we demonstrate that the LLC supports long-lived quantum memories---quantum codes with macroscopic code distance and lifetimes that scale exponentially with system size---under unitary time evolution. Our analytical results provide benchmarks for future numerical studies of the MBL regime at large timescales.
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Despite the fact that power-law interactions occur in a plethora of physical systems, their many-body dynamics is far less understood than that of nearest-neighbor interacting systems. Here, we study information scrambling in strongly disordered spin systems with power-law interactions via out-of-time-order correlators (OTOCs). Numerically, we find pronounced differences in the dynamical spreading of OTOCs between nearest-neighbor and power-law interacting systems. This deviation persists even for short-range interactions, opposing the common view that these interactions produce dynamics equivalent to the nearest-neighbor case. In a detailed experimental proposal, tailored but not limited to Rydberg tweezer setups, we present a protocol to extract OTOCs in XXZ Heisenberg spin systems with tunable anisotropy and programmable disorder based on currently available techniques.
It is shown that the infinite random Heisenberg XXZ spin-12\frac1221​ chain exhibits slow propagation of information (logarithmic light cone), a key signature of many-body localization (MBL), in any fixed energy interval at the bottom of the spectrum. The relevant parameter regime, which covers both weak interaction and strong disorder, is determined solely by the energy interval.
In many-body localized systems, propagation of information forms a light cone that grows logarithmically with time. However, local changes in energy or other conserved quantities are expected to spread only within a finite distance. Is it possible to detect the logarithmic light cone using local observables, starting from thermal states or eigenstates? Here we show that this is indeed the case, but only in an out-of-time-ordered way. In particular, we numerically calculate various correlators in a prototypical model of many-body localization. While correlators of local operators A(t=0)A(t=0)A(t=0) and B(t>0)B(t>0)B(t>0) ordered in time sequence -- e.g., A(t=0)B(t>0)A(t=0)B(t>0)A(t=0)B(t>0) -- are not sensitive to the unbounded information propagation, those with out-of-time order -- e.g., A(t=0)B(t>0)A(t=0)B(t>0)A(t=0)B(t>0)A(t=0)B(t>0)A(t=0)B(t>0)A(t=0)B(t>0) -- can detect the logarithmic light cone. We demonstrate the connection between out-of-time-ordered correlators and the Lieb-Robinson bound in many-body localized systems, and explain how to saturate the latter by measuring the involved commutator on specially designed initial states. Moreover, out-of-time-ordered correlators also allow us to study the temperature dependence of the light cones and we observe an increase of propagation velocity with increasing temperature.