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arXiv:2407.01682 · Physical review. B./Physical review. B

Cluster truncated Wigner approximation for bond-disordered Heisenberg spin models

Adrian Braemer, Javad Vahedi, Martin Gärttner

Published Aug 19, 2024• 4 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

We present a comprehensive numerical investigation of the cluster truncated Wigner approximation (cTWA) applied to quench dynamics in bond-disordered Heisenberg spin chains with power-law interactions. We find that cTWA yields highly accurate results over a wide parameter range. However, its accuracy hinges on a suitable choice of clusters. By using a clustering strategy inspired by the strong disorder renormalization group and real-space renormalization group (RSRG), clusters of two spins are sufficient to obtain essentially exact results in the regime of strong disorder. Surprisingly, even for rather weak disorder, e.g., in the presence of very long-range interactions, this choice of clustering outperforms a naive choice of clusters of consecutive spins. Additionally, we develop a discrete sampling scheme for the initial Wigner function, as an alternative to the originally introduced scheme based on Gaussian approximations. This sampling scheme puts cTWA on the same conceptional footing as regular discrete TWA for single spins and yields some reduction in the Monte Carlo shot noise compared to the Gaussian scheme.

DOI
10.1103/physrevb.110.054204

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We present a comprehensive numerical investigation of the cluster truncated Wigner approximation (cTWA) applied to quench dynamics in bond-disordered Heisenberg spin chains with power-law interactions. We find that cTWA yields highly accurate results over a wide parameter range. However, its accuracy hinges on a suitable choice of clusters. By using a clustering strategy inspired by the strong disorder renormalization group and real-space renormalization group (RSRG), clusters of two spins are sufficient to obtain essentially exact results in the regime of strong disorder. Surprisingly, even for rather weak disorder, e.g., in the presence of very long-range interactions, this choice of clustering outperforms a naive choice of clusters of consecutive spins. Additionally, we develop a discrete sampling scheme for the initial Wigner function, as an alternative to the originally introduced scheme based on Gaussian approximations. This sampling scheme puts cTWA on the same conceptional footing as regular discrete TWA for single spins and yields some reduction in the Monte Carlo shot noise compared to the Gaussian scheme.
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.
A phase-space method, suitable to study the many-body spin dynamics in generic spin lattice models is introduced, discussed, and tested. This technique, which we refer to as the dTWA, is based on the discrete sampling of the Wigner function instead of the continuous sampling in traditional Truncated Wigner Approximation (TWA) methods. The power of the method is demonstrated by comparisons with analytical and numerically exact calculations, which show a significant improvement compared to the TWA, e.g. by capturing revivals of spin-observables. The dTWA is demonstrated to not only correctly reproduce dynamics of one-particle observables but also two-point correlations and spin squeezing, a property relying on entanglement. This method thus opens the possibility to study the quantum dynamics in long-range spin models, accessible to recent state-of-the-art experiments, in regimes where other numerical techniques are inapplicable.
By means of the discrete truncated Wigner approximation, we study dynamical phase transitions arising in the steady state of transverse-field Ising models after a quantum quench. Starting from a fully polarized ferromagnetic initial condition, these transitions separate a phase with nonvanishing magnetization along the ordering direction from a disordered symmetric phase upon increasing the transverse field. We consider two paradigmatic cases, a one-dimensional long-range model with power-law interactions $\ensuremath{\propto}1/{r}^{\ensuremath{\alpha}}$ decaying algebraically as a function of distance rrr and a two-dimensional system with short-range nearest-neighbor interactions. In the former case, we identify dynamical phase transitions for $\ensuremath{\alpha}\ensuremath{\lesssim}2$ and we extract the critical exponents from a data collapse of the steady-state magnetization for up to 1200 lattice sites. We find identical exponents for $\ensuremath{\alpha}\ensuremath{\lesssim}0.5$, suggesting that the dynamical transitions in this regime fall into the same universality class as the nonergodic mean-field limit. The two-dimensional Ising model is believed to be thermalizing, which we also confirm using exact diagonalization for small system sizes. Thus, the dynamical transition is expected to correspond to the thermal phase transition, which is consistent with our data upon comparing to equilibrium quantum Monte Carlo simulations. We further test the accuracy of the discrete truncated Wigner approximation by comparing against numerically exact methods such as exact diagonalization, tensor network, as well as artificial neural network states and we find good quantitative agreement on the accessible time scales. Finally, our work provides an additional contribution to the understanding of the range and the limitations of qualitative and quantitative applicability of the discrete truncated Wigner approximation.
Quench dynamics in a two-dimensional system of interacting fermions is analyzed within the semiclassical truncated Wigner approximation (TWA). The models with short-range and long-range interactions are considered. We show that in the latter case, the TWA is very accurate, becoming asymptotically exact in the infinite-range limit, provided that the semiclassical Hamiltonian is correctly identified. Within the TWA, different dynamical timescales of charges and spins can be clearly distinguished. Interestingly, for a weak and moderate disorder strength, we observe subdiffusive behavior of charges, while spins exhibit diffusive dynamics. At strong disorder, the quantum Fisher information shows logarithmic growth in time with a slower increase for charges than for spins. It is shown that in contrast to the short-range model, strong inhomogeneities such as domain walls in the initial state can significantly slow down thermalization dynamics, especially at weak disorder. This behavior can put additional challenges in designing cold-atom experimental protocols aimed to analyze possible many-body localization in such systems. While within this approach we cannot make any definite statements about the existence of a many-body localized phase, we see a very fast crossover as a function of disorder strength from rapidly thermalizing to a slow glassylike regime both for the short-range and long-range models.
We introduce and implement a reformulation of the strong-disorder renormalization group method in real space, well suited to study bond-disordered antiferromagnetic power-law coupled quantum spin chains. We apply it to a chain of randomly placed spins coupled by power-law long-range interaction with power $\ensuremath{\alpha}$. First, keeping only interactions between adjacent spins, we derive the Master equation and confirm that it is solved by the infinite randomness fixed-point distribution. Then, we derive the master equation for power-law long-range interaction between all spins for any anisotropy $\ensuremath{\gamma}$ ranging from the XX limit, $\ensuremath{\gamma}=0$, to the isotropic Heisenberg limit, $\ensuremath{\gamma}=1,$ which corresponds to a tight-binding chain of disordered long-range interacting fermions with long-range hopping. We thereby show that the distribution function of couplings JJJ smaller than renormalization scale $\mathrm{\ensuremath{\Omega}}$ flows to the strong-disorder fixed-point distribution of finite width $2\ensuremath{\alpha}.$ We find only small corrections to that distribution, which depend on power exponent $\ensuremath{\alpha}$ and coupling anisotropy $\ensuremath{\gamma}.$ As a consequence, the low-temperature magnetic susceptibility diverges with an anomalous power law. The distribution of singlet lengths lll is found to decay as ${l}^{\ensuremath{-}2}$. The entanglement entropy of a subsystem of length nnn increases in the ground state logarithmically for all $\ensuremath{\alpha}$ and $\ensuremath{\gamma}$. After a global quantum quench, the entanglement entropy increases with time logarithmically as $S(t)\ensuremath{\sim}ln(t)/(2\ensuremath{\alpha})$.
Using the truncated Wigner approximation (TWA) we study quench dynamics of two-dimensional lattice systems consisting of interacting spinless fermions with potential disorder. First, we demonstrate that the semiclassical dynamics generally relaxes faster than the full quantum dynamics. We obtain this result by comparing the semiclassical dynamics with exact diagonalization and Lanczos propagation of one-dimensional chains. Next, exploiting the TWA capabilities of simulating large lattices, we investigate how the relaxation rates depend on the dimensionality of the studied system. We show that strongly disordered one-dimensional and two-dimensional systems exhibit a transient, logarithmic-in-time relaxation, which was recently established for one-dimensional chains. Such relaxation corresponds to the infamous 1/f1/f1/f noise at strong disorder.