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arXiv:2304.09636 · Physical review. B./Physical review. B

Time evolution of spread complexity and statistics of work done in quantum quenches

Kuntal Pal, Kunal Pal, Ankit Gill, Tapobrata Sarkar

Published Sep 15, 2023• 32 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

We relate the probability distribution of the work done on a statistical system under a sudden quench to the Lanczos coefficients corresponding to evolution under the postquench Hamiltonian. Using the general relation between the moments and the cumulants of the probability distribution, we show that the Lanczos coefficients can be identified with physical quantities associated with the distribution, e.g., the average work done on the system and its variance, as well as the higher order cumulants. In a sense this gives an interpretation of the Lanczos coefficients in terms of experimentally measurable quantities. Consequently, our approach provides a way towards understanding spread complexity, a quantity that measures the spread of an initial state with time in the Krylov basis generated by the postquench Hamiltonian, from a thermodynamical perspective. We illustrate these relations with two examples. The first one involves quench done on a harmonic chain with periodic boundary conditions and with nearest neighbor interactions. As a second example, we consider mass quench in a free bosonic field theory in $d$ spatial dimensions in the limit of large system size. In both cases, we find out the time evolution of the spread complexity after the quench and relate the Lanczos coefficients with the cumulants of the distribution of the work done on the system.

DOI
10.1103/physrevb.108.104311

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We relate the probability distribution of the work done on a statistical system under a sudden quench to the Lanczos coefficients corresponding to evolution under the postquench Hamiltonian. Using the general relation between the moments and the cumulants of the probability distribution, we show that the Lanczos coefficients can be identified with physical quantities associated with the distribution, e.g., the average work done on the system and its variance, as well as the higher order cumulants. In a sense this gives an interpretation of the Lanczos coefficients in terms of experimentally measurable quantities. Consequently, our approach provides a way towards understanding spread complexity, a quantity that measures the spread of an initial state with time in the Krylov basis generated by the postquench Hamiltonian, from a thermodynamical perspective. We illustrate these relations with two examples. The first one involves quench done on a harmonic chain with periodic boundary conditions and with nearest neighbor interactions. As a second example, we consider mass quench in a free bosonic field theory in ddd spatial dimensions in the limit of large system size. In both cases, we find out the time evolution of the spread complexity after the quench and relate the Lanczos coefficients with the cumulants of the distribution of the work done on the system.
A bstract We consider the statistics of the results of a measurement of the spreading operator in the Krylov basis generated by the Hamiltonian of a quantum system starting from a specified initial pure state. We first obtain the probability distribution of the results of measurements of this spreading operator at a certain instant of time, and compute the characteristic function of this distribution. We show that the moments of this characteristic function are related to the so-called generalised spread complexities, and obtain expressions for them in several cases when the Hamiltonian is an element of a Lie algebra. Furthermore, by considering a continuum limit of the Krylov basis, we show that the generalised spread complexities of higher orders have a peak in the time evolution for a random matrix Hamiltonian belonging to the Gaussian unitary ensemble. We also obtain an upper bound in the change in generalised spread complexity at an arbitrary time in terms of the operator norm of the Hamiltonian and discuss the significance of these results.
We show that the characteristic function of the probability distribution associated with the change of an observable in a two-point measurement protocol with a perturbation can be written as an autocorrelation function between an initial state and a certain unitary evolved state by an effective unitary operator. Using this identification, we probe how the evolved state spreads in the corresponding conjugate space, by defining a notion of the complexity of the spread of this evolved state. For a sudden quench scenario, where the parameters of an initial Hamiltonian (taken as the observable measured in the two-point measurement protocol) are suddenly changed to a new set of values, we first obtain the corresponding Krylov basis vectors and the associated Lanczos coefficients for an initial pure state, and define the associated spread complexity. Interestingly, we find that in such a protocol, the Lanczos coefficients can be related to various cost functions used in the geometric formulation of circuit complexity, for example, the one used to define Fubini-Study complexity. We illustrate the evolution of spread complexity both analytically, by using Lie algebraic techniques, and also by performing numerical computations. This is done for cases when the Hamiltonian before and after the quench are taken as different combinations of chaotic and integrable spin chains. We show that the spread complexity saturates for large values of the parameter only when the prequench Hamiltonian is chaotic. Furthermore, in these examples, we also discuss the importance of the role played by the initial state, which is determined by the time-evolved perturbation operator.
A bstract In quantum many-body systems, time-evolved states typically remain confined to a smaller region of the Hilbert space known as the Krylov subspace . The time evolution can be mapped onto a one-dimensional problem of a particle moving on a chain, where the average position 〈 n 〉 defines Krylov state complexity or spread complexity. Generalized spread complexities, associated with higher-order moments 〈 n p 〉 for p > 1, provide finer insights into the dynamics. We investigate the time evolution of generalized spread complexities following a quantum quench in random matrix theory. The quench is implemented by transitioning from an initial random Hamiltonian to a post-quench Hamiltonian obtained by dividing it into four blocks and flipping the sign of the off-diagonal blocks. This setup captures universal features of chaotic quantum quenches. When the initial state is the thermofield double state of the post-quench Hamiltonian, a peak in spread complexity preceding equilibration signals level repulsion, a hallmark of quantum chaos. We examine the robustness of this peak for other initial states, such as the ground state or the thermofield double state of the pre-quench Hamiltonian. To quantify this behavior, we introduce a measure based on the peak height relative to the late-time saturation value. In the continuous limit, higher-order complexities show increased sensitivity to the peak, supported by numerical simulations for finite-size random matrices.
We investigate the spread complexity of quantum quenches in generalized and long-range Aubry-Andre-Harper (AAH) models, encompassing regimes with and without mobility edges. In particular, in the generalized AAH models supporting energy-dependent mobility edges, we demonstrate that the long-time averaged spread complexity exhibits nonanalytic behavior when the post-quench quasiperiodic potential crosses the mobility edge associated with the energy of the initial eigenstate, thereby accurately identifying the mobility-edge transition. Such a behavior is supported by the spreading of local density of states. We further derive analytical expressions for the moments and the corresponding Lanczos coefficients for quenches between the limits of vanishing and strong quasiperiodic potentials. The Lanczos coefficients display qualitatively distinct behavior depending on the presence of mobility edges - they exhibit an initial plateau followed by a decay with the Krylov basis index, in contrast to the nearly constant behavior of the conventional AAH model without mobility edges. For LR hopping, the coefficients decay with the Krylov basis index for quenches from the localized to the extended phase, while they coincide with the AAH results for quenches in the opposite direction.
We study the spread complexity of the infinite-temperature thermofield double state in large-NNN random matrix theory and investigate the physical meaning of its Lanczos coefficients bnb_nbn​. The leading density of states defines a family of orthogonal polynomials whose recursion coefficients coincide with the Lanczos coefficients of the associated Krylov dynamics. Starting from the Coulomb-gas equation, we derive a pair of nonlinear relations for these coefficients, which we call the Lanczos equations. For normalizable one-cut ensembles, the Lanczos coefficients approach constants at large Krylov index, rendering the asymptotic Krylov chain translationally invariant and the late-time growth of spread complexity linear, with the growth rate given by the spectral average of the group velocity obtained from a Bloch-wave analysis. For an even potential, we further show that the difference between consecutive squared Lanczos coefficients, bn+12−bn2b_{n+1}^2-b_n^2bn+12​−bn2​, is the generating function for two-legged maps whose marked legs are separated by the exact geodesic distance nnn. Consequently, the spread complexity acceleration operator equals twice the geodesic generating operator. We illustrate these results in the quartic matrix model, where the expansion in the quartic coupling counts tetravalent planar maps, and in the double-scaled Sachdev--Ye--Kitaev model, where the auxiliary Hilbert space can be identified with the physical chord Hilbert space.
We analyze time evolution of spread complexity (SC) in an isolated interacting quantum many-body system when it is subjected to a sudden quench. Characteristics features of the time evolution of the SC after the quench are analyzed for different timescales, both in integrable and chaotic models. For a short time after the quench, the SC shows universal quadratic growth, irrespective of the initial state or the nature of the Hamiltonian, with the timescale of this growth being determined by the local density of states. The characteristics of the SC in the next phase depend on the nature of the system, and we show that, depending on whether the survival probability of an initial state is Gaussian or exponential, the SC can continue to grow quadratically, or it can show linear growth. To understand the behavior of the SC at late times, we consider sudden quenches in two models, a full random matrix in the Gaussian orthogonal ensemble, and a spin-1/21/21/2 system with disorder. We observe that, for the full random matrix model and the chaotic phase of the spin-1/21/21/2 system, the SC shows linear growth at early times and saturation at late times. The full random matrix case shows a peak in the intermediate-time region, whereas this feature is less prominent in the spin-1/21/21/2 system, as we explain.