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arXiv:2310.06886 · Physical review. B./Physical review. B

Comparing numerical methods for hydrodynamics in a one-dimensional lattice spin model

Stuart Yi-Thomas, Brayden Ware, Jay Deep Sau, Christopher David White

Published Oct 11, 2024• 17 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

In ergodic quantum spin chains, locally conserved quantities such as energy or particle number generically evolve according to hydrodynamic equations as they relax to equilibrium. We investigate the complexity of simulating hydrodynamics at infinite temperature with multiple methods: time evolving block decimation (TEBD), TEBD with density matrix truncation (DMT), the recursion method with a universal operator growth hypothesis, and operator-size truncated (OST) dynamics. Density matrix truncation and the OST dynamics give consistent dynamical correlations to $t=60/J$ and diffusion coefficients agreeing within $1%$. TEBD only converges for $t\ensuremath{\lesssim}20$, but still produces diffusion coefficients accurate within 1%. The universal operator growth hypothesis fails to converge and only matches other methods on short times. We see no evidence of long-time tails in either DMT or OST calculations of the current-current correlator, although we cannot rule out that they appear at longer times. We do observe power-law corrections to the energy density correlator. At finite wavelength, we observe a crossover from purely diffusive, overdamped decay of the energy density to underdamped oscillatory behavior similar to that of cold-atom experiments. We dub this behavior ``hot band second sound'' and offer a microscopically motivated toy model.

DOI
10.1103/physrevb.110.134308

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In ergodic quantum spin chains, locally conserved quantities such as energy or particle number generically evolve according to hydrodynamic equations as they relax to equilibrium. We investigate the complexity of simulating hydrodynamics at infinite temperature with multiple methods: time evolving block decimation (TEBD), TEBD with density matrix truncation (DMT), the recursion method with a universal operator growth hypothesis, and operator-size truncated (OST) dynamics. Density matrix truncation and the OST dynamics give consistent dynamical correlations to t=60/Jt=60/Jt=60/J and diffusion coefficients agreeing within 11%1. TEBD only converges for t\ensuremath≲20t\ensuremath{\lesssim}20t\ensuremath≲20, but still produces diffusion coefficients accurate within 1%. The universal operator growth hypothesis fails to converge and only matches other methods on short times. We see no evidence of long-time tails in either DMT or OST calculations of the current-current correlator, although we cannot rule out that they appear at longer times. We do observe power-law corrections to the energy density correlator. At finite wavelength, we observe a crossover from purely diffusive, overdamped decay of the energy density to underdamped oscillatory behavior similar to that of cold-atom experiments. We dub this behavior ``hot band second sound'' and offer a microscopically motivated toy model.
Extracting late-time hydrodynamic transport properties directly from microscopic quantum models, especially in dimensions beyond one, is believed to be classically intractable. This owes, in part, to the extensive growth of entanglement in higher dimensions and often a mismatch between geometric and tensor network locality. Here, we extend the Density Matrix Truncation (DMT) algorithm to accurately and quantitatively predict high-temperature transport coefficients (e.g. diffusion constants) in up to three dimensions. Additionally, we demonstrate the ability to capture the slow crossover dynamics characteristic of weakly broken integrability. The intuition underlying our approach is to preserve the geometrically local information crucial for hydrodynamics throughout the time evolution, despite using a one-dimensional matrix product state ansatz for higher-dimensional calculations. Our work pushes the boundary of classical computability and opens the door to benchmarking the high-temperature, late-time dynamics of generic quantum simulators.
A tremendous amount of recent attention has focused on characterizing the dynamical properties of periodically driven many-body systems. Here, we use a novel numerical tool termed "density matrix truncation" (DMT) to investigate the late-time dynamics of large-scale Floquet systems. We find that DMT accurately captures two essential pieces of Floquet physics, namely, prethermalization and late-time heating to infinite temperature. Moreover, by implementing a spatially inhomogeneous drive, we demonstrate that an interplay between Floquet heating and diffusive transport is crucial to understanding the system's dynamics. Finally, we show that DMT also provides a powerful method for quantitatively capturing the emergence of hydrodynamics in static (undriven) Hamiltonians; in particular, by simulating the dynamics of generic, large-scale quantum spin chains (up to L=100), we are able to directly extract the energy diffusion coefficient.
Generic short-range interacting quantum systems with a conserved quantity exhibit universal diffusive transport at late times. We employ nonequilibrium quantum field theory and semiclassical phase-space simulations to show how this universality is replaced by a more general transport process in a long-range XY spin chain at infinite temperature with couplings decaying algebraically with distance as ${r}^{\ensuremath{-}\ensuremath{\alpha}}$. While diffusion is recovered for $\ensuremath{\alpha}>1.5$, longer-ranged couplings with $0.5<\ensuremath{\alpha}\ensuremath{\le}1.5$ give rise to effective classical L\'evy flights, a random walk with step sizes drawn from a distribution with algebraic tails. We find that the space-time-dependent spin density profiles are self-similar, with scaling functions given by the stable symmetric distributions. As a consequence, for $0.5<\ensuremath{\alpha}\ensuremath{\le}1.5$, autocorrelations show hydrodynamic tails decaying in time as ${t}^{\ensuremath{-}1/(2\ensuremath{\alpha}\ensuremath{-}1)}$ and linear-response theory breaks down. Our findings can be readily verified with current trapped ion experiments.
Connecting short-time microscopic dynamics with long-time hydrodynamics in strongly correlated quantum systems is one of the outstanding questions. In particular, it is hard to determine various hydrodynamic coefficients such as the diffusion constant or viscosity starting from a microscopic model: exact quantum simulations are limited to either small system sizes or to short times, which are insufficient to reach asymptotic behavior and so various approximations must be applied. We show that these difficulties, at least for particular models, can be circumvented by using the cluster truncated Wigner approximation (CTWA), which maps quantum Hamiltonian dynamics into classical Hamiltonian dynamics in auxiliary high-dimensional phase space. We apply CTWA to XXZ next-nearest-neighbor spin-1/2 chains and XY spin ladders, and find behavior consisting of short-time spin relaxation which gradually crosses over to emergent diffusive behavior at long times. For a random initial state, we show that CTWA correctly reproduces the whole spin spectral function. Necessary in this construction is sampling from properly fluctuating initial conditions: the Dirac mean-field (variational) ansatz, which neglects such fluctuations, leads to incorrect predictions.
We search for emergent hydrodynamic modes in real-time Hamiltonian dynamics of 2 + 1 -dimensional SU(2) lattice gauge theory on a quasi-one-dimensional plaquette chain, by numerically computing symmetric correlation functions of energy densities on lattice sizes of about 20 with the local Hilbert space truncated at j max = 1 2 . Because of the Umklapp processes, we only find a mode for energy diffusion. The symmetric correlator exhibits transport peak near zero frequency with a width approximately proportional to momentum squared at small momentum, when the system is fully quantum ergodic, as indicated by the eigenenergy level statistics. This transport peak leads to a power-law t − 1 2 decay of the symmetric correlator at late time, also known as the long-time tail, as well as diffusionlike spreading in position space. We also introduce a quantum algorithm for computing the symmetric correlator on a quantum computer and find it gives results consistent with exact diagonalization when tested on the IBM emulator. Finally we discuss the future prospect of searching for the sound modes.
We study the spin and energy dynamics in one-dimensional spin-12\frac{1}{2}21​ systems induced by local quantum quenches at finite temperatures using a time-dependent density matrix renormalization group method. System sizes are chosen large enough to ensure that the time-dependent data for the accessible time scales represent the behavior in the thermodynamic limit. As a main result, we observe a ballistic spreading of perturbations of the energy density in the integrable spin-12\frac{1}{2}21​ XXZ chain for all temperatures and exchange anisotropies, related to the divergent thermal conductivity in this model and the exact conservation of the energy current. In contrast, the spin dynamics is ballistic in the massless phase, but shows a diffusive behavior at high temperatures in the easy-axis phase in the case of a vanishing background spin density. We extract a quantitative estimate for the spin-diffusion constant from the time dependence of the spatial variance of the spin density, which agrees well with values obtained from current-current correlation functions using an Einstein relation. Interestingly, the diffusion constant approaches a constant value deep in the easy-axis regime. As an example for nonintegrable models, we consider two-leg ladders, for which we observe indications of diffusive energy and spin dynamics. The relevance of our results for recent experiments with quantum magnets and bosons in optical lattices is discussed.