We revisit the problem of integrability breaking in free fermionic quantum spin chains. We investigate the so-called adiabatic gauge potential (AGP), which was recently proposed as an accurate probe of quantum chaos. We also study the so-called weak integrability breaking, which occurs if the dynamical effects of the perturbation do not appear at leading order in the perturbing parameter. A recent statement in the literature claimed that integrability breaking should generally lead to an exponential growth of the AGP norm with respect to the volume. However, afterwards it was found that weak integrability breaking is a counter-example, leading to a cross-over between polynomial and exponential growth. Here we show that in free fermionic systems the AGP norm always grows polynomially, if the perturbation is local with respect to the fermions, even if the perturbation strongly breaks integrability. As a by-product of our computations we also find, that in free fermionic spin chains there are operators which weakly break integrability, but which are not associated with known long range deformations.
We revisit the problem of integrability breaking in free fermionic quantum spin chains. We investigate the so-called adiabatic gauge potential (AGP), which was recently proposed as an accurate probe of quantum chaos. We also study the so-called weak integrability breaking, which occurs if the dynamical effects of the perturbation do not appear at leading order in the perturbing parameter. A recent statement in the literature claimed that integrability breaking should generally lead to an exponential growth of the AGP norm with respect to the volume. However, afterwards it was found that weak integrability breaking is a counter-example, leading to a cross-over between polynomial and exponential growth. Here we show that in free fermionic systems the AGP norm always grows polynomially, if the perturbation is local with respect to the fermions, even if the perturbation strongly breaks integrability. As a by-product of our computations we also find, that in free fermionic spin chains there are operators which weakly break integrability, but which are not associated with known long range deformations.
We consider the spin-21 Heisenberg chain (XXX model) weakly perturbed away from integrability by an isotropic next-to-nearest neighbor exchange interaction. Recently, it was conjectured that this model possesses an infinite tower of quasiconserved integrals of motion (charges) [D. Kurlov et al., Phys. Rev. B 105, 104302 (2022)]. In this work we first test this conjecture by investigating how the norm of the adiabatic gauge potential (AGP) scales with the system size, which is known to be a remarkably accurate measure of chaos. We find that for the perturbed XXX chain the behavior of the AGP norm corresponds to neither an integrable nor a chaotic regime, which supports the conjectured quasi-integrability of the model. We then prove the conjecture and explicitly construct the infinite set of quasiconserved charges. Our proof relies on the fact that the XXX chain perturbed by next-to-nearest exchange interaction can be viewed as a truncation of an integrable long-range deformation of the Heisenberg spin chain.
An integrable model perturbed by special ``weak-integrability-breaking'' perturbations thermalizes at timescales much longer than predicted by Fermi's golden rule. Recently, a systematic construction of such perturbations based on the so-called long-range deformations of integrable chains was formulated. These perturbations, obtained as truncations of the long-range deformations in some small parameter expansions, can be viewed as produced by unitary rotations of the short-range integrable models. For infinite systems, several ``generators'' (extensive local, boosted, and bilocal operators) of weak perturbations are known. The main aim of this work is to understand the appropriate generators in finite systems with periodic boundaries since simple counterparts to boosted and bilocal operators are not known in such cases. We approach this by studying the structure of the adiabatic gauge potential (AGP), a proxy for such generators in finite chains, which was originally introduced as a sensitive measure of quantum chaos. We prove an exact relation between the AGPs for the boosted and bilocal classes of generators and note that the counterpart to the boost does not appear in a closed analytic form in finite systems but shows quasilocality nonetheless. We also introduce and study strictly local variants of weak-integrability-breaking perturbations.
In the past decades, it was recognized that quantum chaos, which is essential for the emergence of statistical mechanics and thermodynamics, manifests itself in the effective description of the eigenstates of chaotic Hamiltonians through random matrix ensembles and the eigenstate thermalization hypothesis.Standard measures of chaos in quantum many-body systems are level statistics and the spectral form factor.In this work, we show that the norm of the adiabatic gauge potential, the generator of adiabatic deformations between eigenstates, serves as a much more sensitive measure of quantum chaos.We are able to detect transitions from integrable to chaotic behavior at perturbation strengths orders of magnitude smaller than those required for standard measures.Using this alternative probe in two generic classes of spin chains, we show that the chaotic threshold decreases exponentially with system size and that one can immediately detect integrability-breaking (chaotic) perturbations by analyzing infinitesimal perturbations even at the integrable point.In some cases, small integrability breaking is shown to lead to anomalously slow relaxation of the system, exponentially long in system size.
In the last few decades, the study of many-body quantum systems far from equilibrium has risen to prominence, with exciting developments on both experimental and theoretical physics fronts. In this dissertation, we will focus particularly on the adiabatic gauge potential (AGP), which is the generator of adiabatic deformations between quantum eigenstates and also related to "fidelity susceptibility", as our lens into the general phenomenon. In the first two projects, the AGP is studied in the context of counter-diabatic driving protocols which present a way of generating adiabatic dynamics at an arbitrary pace. This is quite useful as adiabatic evolution, which is a common strategy for manipulating quantum states, is inherently a slow process and is, therefore, susceptible to noise and decoherence from the environment. However, obtaining and implementing the AGP in many-body systems is a formidable task, requiring knowledge of the spectral properties of the instantaneous Hamiltonians and control of highly nonlocal multibody interactions. We show how an approximate gauge potential can be systematically built up as a series of nested commutators, remaining well-defined in the thermodynamic limit. Furthermore, the resulting counter-diabatic driving protocols can be realized up to arbitrary order without leaving the available control space using tools from periodically-driven (Floquet) systems. In the first project, this driving protocol was successfully implemented on the electronic spin of a nitrogen vacancy in diamond as a proof of concept and in the second project, it was extended to many-body systems, where it was shown the resulting Floquet protocols significantly suppress dissipation and provide a drastic increase in fidelity. In the third project, the AGP is studied in the context of quantum chaos wherein it is found to be an extremely sensitive probe. We are able to detect transitions from non-ergodic to ergodic behavior at perturbation strengths orders of magnitude smaller than those required for standard measures. Using this alternative probe in two generic classes of spin chains, we show that the chaotic threshold decreases exponentially with system size and that one can immediately detect integrability-breaking (chaotic) perturbations by analyzing infinitesimal perturbations even at the integrable point. In some cases, small integrability-breaking is shown to lead to anomalously slow relaxation of the system, exponentially long in system size. This work paves the way for further studies in various areas such as quantum computation, quantum state preparation and quantum chaos.
We show how to systematically construct weak integrability breaking perturbations (WIBs) for classical integrable models on the lattice. These perturbations, which allow quasi-conserved quantities, have mostly been explored in quantum systems, where they are expected to delay the onset of thermalization and diffusive transport to timescales far exceeding those predicted by Fermi's golden rule. However, accessing such long-time dynamics in quantum models is computationally challenging. Classical integrable lattice models offer a complementary setting for probing transport and long-time dynamics under WIBs. In this work, we specialize our general framework to construct several families of WIBs for the Ishimori model, the Toda chain, and the Harmonic Oscillator Chain (HOC). Such constructions can help quantify how WIBs contribute to anomalous transport and serve as a benchmark for thermalization studies in perturbed integrable models. An important example is the Fermi-Pasta-Ulam-Tsingou (FPUT) model: Starting from the HOC, we show that the cubic nonlinearity (the alpha-FPUT interaction) is a genuine WIB perturbation. Using the integrals of motion (IoMs) of the Toda lattice, we explicitly construct corrections to the entire hierarchy of the HOC IoMs, thereby obtaining an infinite tower of quasi-conserved quantities for the alpha-FPUT chain. We further identify the corresponding adiabatic gauge potential (AGP) as a nontrivial trilocal generator in real space, and show that, more generally, any cubic, translationally invariant, momentum-conserving perturbation of the HOC admits such a generator and is therefore a WIB. Together with our transport and AGP-variance studies, our results provide a unified classical framework for weak integrability breaking and for diagnosing anomalous thermalization and transport in nearly integrable Hamiltonian lattice systems.
In this paper we study nearest-neighbour deformations of integrable models. After expanding in the deformation parameter, we identify four possible types of deformations. First there are deformations that simply break or preserve integrability. Then we find two different subtle cases. The first case is where the deformation is only integrable if all orders of the deformation parameter are taken into account. An example of these are the long-range deformations that appear in holographic models. The second case is when the deformation is perturbatively integrable to some order in the deformation parameter but can not be extended to an integrable model. In this paper we work this out for the XXZ spin chain and discuss the level statistics of each of these cases. We find numerical evidence that the onset of chaos occurs differently in each of these models. For the perturbatively integrable models, we find that the deformation strength at which chaos appears demonstrates a volume-scaling intermediate between strong and weak integrability breaking models.