Using artificial dissipation to tame entanglement growth, we chart the emergence of diffusion in a generic interacting lattice model for varying U(1) charge densities. We follow the crossover from ballistic to diffusive transport above a scale set by the scattering length, finding the intuitive result that the diffusion constant scales as D ∝ 1 / ρ at low densities ρ . Our numerical approach generalizes the Dissipation-Assisted Operator Evolution algorithm: in the spirit of the Bogoliubov-Born-Green-Kirkwood-Yvon hierarchy, we effectively approximate nonlocal operators by their ensemble averages, rather than discarding them entirely. This greatly reduces the operator entanglement entropy, while still giving accurate predictions for diffusion constants across all density scales. We further construct a minimal model for the transport crossover, yielding charge correlation functions which agree well with our numerical data. Our results clarify the dominant contributions to hydrodynamic correlation functions of conserved densities, and serve as a guide for generalizations to low-temperature transport.
Using artificial dissipation to tame entanglement growth, we chart the emergence of diffusion in a generic interacting lattice model for varying U(1) charge densities. We follow the crossover from ballistic to diffusive transport above a scale set by the scattering length, finding the intuitive result that the diffusion constant scales as D ∝ 1 / ρ at low densities ρ . Our numerical approach generalizes the Dissipation-Assisted Operator Evolution algorithm: in the spirit of the Bogoliubov-Born-Green-Kirkwood-Yvon hierarchy, we effectively approximate nonlocal operators by their ensemble averages, rather than discarding them entirely. This greatly reduces the operator entanglement entropy, while still giving accurate predictions for diffusion constants across all density scales. We further construct a minimal model for the transport crossover, yielding charge correlation functions which agree well with our numerical data. Our results clarify the dominant contributions to hydrodynamic correlation functions of conserved densities, and serve as a guide for generalizations to low-temperature transport.
Charge and energy are expected to diffuse in interacting systems of fermions at finite temperatures, even in the absence of disorder, with the interactions inducing a crossover from the coherent and ballistic streaming of quasi-particles at early times, to incoherent diffusive behavior at late times. The relevant crossover timescales and the transport coefficients are both controlled by the strength of interactions. In this work we develop a numerical method to simulate such systems at high temperatures, applicable in a wide range of interaction strengths, by adapting Dissipation-assisted Operator Evolution (DAOE) to fermions. Our fermion DAOE, which approximates the exact dynamics by systematically discarding information from high n-point functions, is tailored to capture non-interacting dynamics exactly, thus providing a good starting point for the weakly interacting problem. Applying our method to a microscopic model of weakly interacting fermions, we numerically demonstrate that the crossover from ballistic to diffusive transport happens at a time tD∼1/Δ2 and that the diffusion constant similarly scales as D∼1/Δ2, where Δ is the interaction strength. We substantiate this scaling with a Fermi's golden rule calculation in the operator spreading picture, interpreting tD as the fermion-fermion scattering time and lifetime of the single-particle Green's function.
We introduce the dissipation-assisted operator evolution (DAOE) method for calculating transport properties of strongly interacting lattice systems in the high temperature regime. DAOE is based on evolving observables in the Heisenberg picture, and applying an artificial dissipation that reduces the weight on non-local operators. We represent the observable as a matrix product operator, and show that the dissipation leads to a decay of operator entanglement, allowing us to capture the dynamics to long times. We test this scheme by calculating spin and energy diffusion constants in a variety of physical models. By gradually weakening the dissipation, we are able to consistently extrapolate our results to the case of zero dissipation, thus estimating the physical diffusion constant with high precision.
In the absence of disorder and interactions, fermions move coherently and their associated charge and energy exhibit ballistic spreading, even at finite energy density. In the presence of weak interactions and a finite energy density, fermion-fermion scattering leads to a crossover between early-time ballistic and late-time diffusive transport. The relevant crossover timescales and the transport coefficients are both functions of interaction strength, but the question of determining the precise functional dependence is likely impossible to answer exactly. In this work we develop a numerical method (fDAOE) which is powerful enough to provide an approximate answer to this question, and which is consistent with perturbative arguments in the limit of very weak interactions. Our algorithm, which adapts the existing dissipation-assisted operator evolution (DAOE) to fermions, is applicable to systems of interacting fermions at high temperatures. The algorithm approximates the exact dynamics by systematically discarding information from high n -point functions, and is tailored to capture noninteracting dynamics exactly. Applying our method to a microscopic model of interacting fermions, we numerically determine crossover timescales and diffusion constants for a wide range of interaction strengths. In the limit of weak interaction strength ( Δ ), we demonstrate that the crossover from ballistic to diffusive transport happens at a time tD∼1/Δ2 and that the diffusion constant similarly scales as D∼1/Δ2 . We confirm that these scalings are consistent with a perturbative Fermi's golden rule calculation, and we provide a heuristic operator-spreading picture for the crossover between ballistic and diffusive transport. Published by the American Physical Society 2024
We study the scrambling of local quantum information in chaotic many-body systems in the presence of a locally conserved quantity like charge or energy that moves diffusively.The interplay between conservation laws and scrambling sheds light on the mechanism by which unitary quantum dynamics, which is reversible, gives rise to diffusive hydrodynamics, which is a slow dissipative process.We obtain our results in a random quantum circuit model that is constrained to have a conservation law.We find that a generic spreading operator consists of two parts: (i) a conserved part which comprises the weight of the spreading operator on the local conserved densities, whose dynamics is described by diffusive charge spreading; this conserved part also acts as a source that steadily emits a flux of (ii) nonconserved operators.This emission leads to dissipation in the operator hydrodynamics, with the dissipative process being the slow conversion of operator weight from local conserved operators to nonconserved, at a rate set by the local diffusion current.The emitted nonconserved parts then spread ballistically at a butterfly speed, thus becoming highly nonlocal and, hence, essentially nonobservable, thereby acting as the "reservoir" that facilitates the dissipation.In addition, we find that the nonconserved component develops a power-law tail behind its leading ballistic front due to the slow dynamics of the conserved components.This implies that the out-of-time-order commutator between two initially separated operators grows sharply upon the arrival of the ballistic front, but, in contrast to systems with no conservation laws, it develops a diffusive tail and approaches its asymptotic late-time value only as a power of time instead of exponentially.We also derive these results within an effective hydrodynamic description which contains multiple coupled diffusion equations.
Interacting lattice Hamiltonians at high temperature generically give rise to energy transport governed by the classical diffusion equation; however, predicting the rate of diffusion requires numerical simulation of the microscopic quantum dynamics. For the purpose of predicting such transport properties, computational time evolution methods must be paired with schemes to control the growth of entanglement to tractably simulate for sufficiently long times. One such truncation scheme---dissipation-assisted operator evolution (DAOE)---controls entanglement by damping out components of operators with large Pauli weight. In this paper, we generalize DAOE to treat fermionic systems. Our method instead damps out components of operators with large fermionic weight. We investigate the performance of DAOE, the new fermionic DAOE (FDAOE), and another simulation method, density matrix truncation (DMT), in simulating energy transport in an interacting one-dimensional Majorana chain. The chain is found to have a diffusion coefficient scaling like interaction strength to the fourth power, contrary to naive expectations based on Fermi's Golden rule---but consistent with recent predictions based on the theory of weak integrability breaking. In the weak interaction regime where the fermionic nature of the system is most relevant, FDAOE is found to simulate the system more efficiently than DAOE.
We identify emergent hydrodynamics governing charge transport in Brownian random time evolution with various symmetries, constraints, and ranges of interactions. This is accomplished via a mapping between the averaged dynamics and the low-energy spectrum of a Lindblad operator, which acts as an effective Hamiltonian in a doubled Hilbert space. By explicitly constructing dispersive excited states of this effective Hamiltonian using a single-mode approximation, we provide a comprehensive understanding of diffusive, subdiffusive, and superdiffusive relaxation in many-body systems with conserved multipole moments and variable interaction ranges. Our approach further allows us to identify exotic Krylov-space-resolved diffusive relaxation despite the presence of dipole conservation, which we verify numerically. Therefore, we provide a general and versatile framework to qualitatively understand the dynamics of conserved operators under random unitary time evolution.