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arXiv:2312.14007 · SciPost Physics Core

Identifying diffusive length scales in one-dimensional Bose gases

Frederik Møller, Federica Cataldini, Jörg Schmiedmayer

Published May 7, 2024• 5 citations
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Abstract

In the hydrodynamics of integrable models, diffusion is a subleading correction to ballistic propagation. Here we quantify the diffusive contribution for one-dimensional Bose gases and find it most influential in the crossover between the main thermodynamic regimes of the gas. Analysing the experimentally measured dynamics of a single density mode, we find diffusion to be relevant only for high wavelength excitations. Instead, the observed relaxation is solely caused by a ballistically driven dephasing process, whose time scale is related to the phonon lifetime of the system and is thus useful to evaluate the applicability of the phonon bases typically used in quantum field simulators.

DOI
10.21468/scipostphyscore.7.2.025

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In the hydrodynamics of integrable models, diffusion is a subleading correction to ballistic propagation. Here we quantify the diffusive contribution for one-dimensional Bose gases and find it most influential in the crossover between the main thermodynamic regimes of the gas. Analysing the experimentally measured dynamics of a single density mode, we find diffusion to be relevant only for high wavelength excitations. Instead, the observed relaxation is solely caused by a ballistically driven dephasing process, whose time scale is related to the phonon lifetime of the system and is thus useful to evaluate the applicability of the phonon bases typically used in quantum field simulators.
Collective excitations in one-dimensional (1D) quantum fluids are expected to propagate almost without dissipation. Here we directly excite phonon modes in a weakly interacting 1D Bose gas and study their time evolution. In the linear response regime, damping is surprisingly fast and quantitatively follows the non-analytic scaling predicted by Andreev's hydrodynamic description. For stronger excitations, we observe a crossover to a highly nonlinear regime characterized by wave breaking, captured by the finite-temperature nonlinear Schrödinger evolution. Our results resolve a long-standing question on the fate of phonons in 1D Bose gases, and open new pathways to study non-linear relaxation in quantum many-body systems.
For a decade the fate of a one-dimensional gas of interacting bosons in an external trapping potential remained mysterious. We here show that whenever the underlying integrability of the gas is broken by the presence of the external potential, the inevitable diffusive rearrangements between the quasiparticles, quantified by the diffusion constants of the gas, eventually lead the system to thermalize at late times. We show that the full thermalizing dynamics can be described by the generalized hydrodynamics with diffusion and force terms, and we compare these predictions to numerical simulations. Finally, we provide an explanation for the slow thermalization rates observed in numerical and experimental settings: the hydrodynamics of integrable models is characterized by a continuity of modes, which can have arbitrarily small diffusion coefficients. As a consequence, the approach to thermalization can display prethermal plateau and relaxation dynamics with long polynomial finite-time corrections.
We study the nonequilibrium dynamics of a coherently split one-dimensional Bose gas by measuring the full probability distribution functions of matter-wave interference. Observing the system on different length scales allows us to probe the dynamics of excitations on different energy scales, revealing two distinct length-scale-dependent regimes of relaxation. We measure the crossover length scale separating these two regimes and identify it with the prethermalized phase-correlation length of the system. Our approach enables a direct observation of the multimode dynamics characterizing one-dimensional quantum systems.
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.
The relationship between many-body interactions and dimensionality is integral to numerous emergent quantum phenomena.A striking example is the Bose gas, which upon confinement to one dimension (1D) obeys an infinite set of conservation laws, prohibiting thermalization and constraining dynamics.In our experiment, we demonstrate that such a 1D behavior can extend much further into the dimensional crossover toward 3D than expected.Starting from a weakly interacting Bose gas trapped in a highly elongated potential, we perform a quench to instigate the dynamics of a single density mode.Employing the theory of generalized hydrodynamics, we identify the dominant relaxation mechanism as the 1D dephasing of the relevant collective excitations of the system, the rapidities.Surprisingly, the dephasing remains dominant even for temperatures far exceeding conventional limits of one dimensionality where thermalization should occur.We attribute our observations to an emergent Pauli blocking of transverse excitations caused by the rapidities assuming fermionic statistics, despite the gas being purely bosonic.Thus, our study suggests that 1D physics is less fragile than previously thought, as it can persist even in the presence of significant perturbations.More broadly, by employing the exact Bethe ansatz solutions of the many-body system, we facilitate an interpretation of how the emergent macroscopic behavior arises from the microscopic interactions.
We theoretically investigate the nonequilibrium relaxation of a spatial density modulation in a one-dimensional, weakly interacting Bose gas, and its connection to the equilibrium scattering rate γk∝k3/2\smash{γ_k\propto k^{3/2}}γk​∝k3/2 of the system's phononic excitations. We show that the relaxation is generally governed by a nonequilibrium scattering rate γk,tγ_{k,t}γk,t​ coupled to quantum fluctuations, which approaches its equilibrium value γkγ_kγk​ only at long times. Numerical simulations of quantum kinetic equations reveal an algebraic convergence, γk,t−γk∼t−2/3\smash{γ_{k,t} - γ_k \sim t^{-2/3}}γk,t​−γk​∼t−2/3, confirmed by analytical predictions. More broadly, our results establish a theoretical framework for experimentally probing phonon dynamics through the temporal evolution of local perturbations in quantum gases.