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arXiv:2404.15827 · Physical Review A

Signatures of conformal symmetry in the dynamics of quantum gases: A cyclic quantum state and entanglement entropy

Jeff Maki, Fei Zhou

Published Aug 12, 2024• 2 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

Conformal symmetry heavily constrains the dynamics of nonrelativistic quantum gases tuned to a nearby quantum critical point. One important consequence of this symmetry is that entropy production can be absent in far-away-from-equilibrium dynamics of strongly interacting three-dimensional (3D) and one-dimensional (1D) quantum gases placed inside an adjustable harmonic trapping potential. This can lead to an oscillatory fully revivable many-body dynamic state, which is reflected in many physical observables. In this article we further investigate the consequences of conformal symmetry on (a) the zero-temperature autocorrelation function, (b) the Wigner distribution function, and (c) the von Neumann entanglement entropy. A direct calculation of these quantities for generic strongly interacting systems is usually extremely difficult. However, we have derived the general structures of these functions in the nonequilibrium dynamics when their dynamics are constrained by conformal symmetry. We obtain our results for (a) by utilizing an operator-state correspondence which connects the imaginary time evolution of primary operators to different initial states of harmonically trapped gases, while the dynamics of the functions in (b) and (c) are derived from conformal invariant density matrices.

DOI
10.1103/physreva.110.023312

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We investigate the entanglement properties of the nonequilibrium dynamics of one-dimensional noninteracting Fermi gases released from a trap. The gas of NNN particles is initially in the ground state within a hard-wall or a harmonic trap, and then it expands after dropping the trap. We compute the time dependence of the von Neumann and R\'enyi entanglement entropies and the particle fluctuations of spatial intervals around the original trap in the limit of a large number NNN of particles. The results for these observables apply to one-dimensional gases of impenetrable bosons as well. We identify different dynamical regimes at small and large times, depending also on the initial condition, i.e., whether it is that of a hard-wall or a harmonic trap. In particular, we show analytically that the expansion from hard-wall traps is characterized by the asymptotic small-time behavior $S\ensuremath{\approx}(1/3)\mathrm{ln}(1/t)$ of the von Neumann entanglement entropy and the relation $S\ensuremath{\approx}{\ensuremath{\pi}}^{2}V/3$ (where VVV is the particle variance), which are analogous to the equilibrium behaviors whose leading logarithms are essentially determined by the corresponding conformal field theory with central charge c=1c=1c=1. The time dependence of the entanglement entropy of extended regions during the expansion from harmonic traps has a remarkable property in that it can be expressed as a global time-dependent rescaling of the space dependence of the initial equilibrium entanglement entropy.