We investigate the interplay between unitary and non-unitary driven many-body dynamics in (1+1)-dimensional quantum critical systems described by conformal field theory (CFT). By formulating a coherent state approach, we demonstrate that the growth of entanglement entropy and energy can be found analytically for a class of non-unitary driven CFTs, where the evolution alternates between real and imaginary time evolution, the latter corresponding to postselected weak measurements. We find that non-unitary evolution leads to the emergence of steady states at infinite times for the cases of periodic, quasiperiodic, and random drives. In a special class of drives, for mixed initial states, we uncover purification phase transitions that arise as a result of the competition between unitary evolution and weak measurements. We compare the CFT evolution with the corresponding non-unitary dynamics of critical lattice models, finding remarkable agreement.
We investigate the interplay between unitary and non-unitary driven many-body dynamics in (1+1)-dimensional quantum critical systems described by conformal field theory (CFT). By formulating a coherent state approach, we demonstrate that the growth of entanglement entropy and energy can be found analytically for a class of non-unitary driven CFTs, where the evolution alternates between real and imaginary time evolution, the latter corresponding to postselected weak measurements. We find that non-unitary evolution leads to the emergence of steady states at infinite times for the cases of periodic, quasiperiodic, and random drives. In a special class of drives, for mixed initial states, we uncover purification phase transitions that arise as a result of the competition between unitary evolution and weak measurements. We compare the CFT evolution with the corresponding non-unitary dynamics of critical lattice models, finding remarkable agreement.
In this paper, we analytically study phase transitions in quasiperiodically driven one-dimensional quantum critical systems that are described by conformal field theories (CFTs). The phase diagrams and phase transitions can be analytically obtained by using Avila's global theory in one-frequency quasiperiodic cocycles. Compared to previous works where the quasiperiodicity was introduced in the driving time and no phase transitions were observed [Wen et al., Phys. Rev. Res. 3, 023044 (2021)], here we propose a setup where the quasiperiodicity is introduced in the driving Hamiltonians. In our setup, one can observe the heating phases, nonheating phases, and phase transitions. The phase diagram as well as the Lyapunov exponents that determine the entanglement entropy evolution can be analytically obtained. In addition, based on Avila's theory, we prove there is no phase transition in the previously proposed setup of quasiperiodically driven CFTs [Wen et al., Phys. Rev. Res. 3, 023044 (2021)]. We verify our field theory results by studying the time evolution of entanglement entropy on lattice models.
Abstract In this series of works, we study exactly solvable non-unitary time evolutions in one-dimensional quantum critical systems ranging from quantum quenches to time-dependent drivings. In this part I, we are motivated by the recent works of Kontsevich and Segal (2021 arXiv: 2105.10161 ) and Witten (2021 arXiv: 2111.06514 ) on allowable complex spacetime metrics in quantum field theories. In general, such complex spacetime metrics will lead to non-unitary time evolutions. In this work, we study the universal features of such non-unitary time evolutions based on exactly solvable setups. Various physical quantities including the entanglement Hamiltonian and entanglement spectrum, entanglement entropy, and energy density at an arbitrary time can be exactly solved. Due to the damping effect introduced by the complex time, the excitations in the initial state are gradually damped out in time. The non-equilibrium dynamics exhibit universal features that are qualitatively different from the case of real-time evolutions. For instance, for an infinite system after a global quench, the entanglement entropy of the semi-infinite subsystem will grow logarithmically in time, in contrast to the linear growth in a real-time evolution. Moreover, we study numerically the time-dependent driven quantum critical systems with allowable complex spacetime metrics. It is found that the competition between driving and damping leads to a steady state with an interesting entanglement structure.
Characterizing universal entanglement features in higher-dimensional quantum matter is a central goal of quantum information science and condensed matter physics. While the subleading corner terms in two-dimensional quantum systems encapsulate essential universal information of the underlying conformal field theory, our understanding of these features remains remarkably limited compared to their one-dimensional counterparts. We address this challenge by investigating the entanglement dynamics of fermionic systems along the imaginary-time evolution. We uncover a pioneering non-equilibrium scaling law where the corner entanglement entropy grows linearly with the logarithm of imaginary time, dictated solely by the universality class of the quantum critical point. Through unbiased Quantum Monte Carlo simulations, we verify this scaling in the interacting Gross-Neveu-Yukawa model, demonstrating that universal data can be accurately recovered from the early stages of relaxation. Our findings significantly circumvent the computational bottlenecks inherent in reaching full equilibrium convergence. This work establishes a direct link between the fundamental theory of non-equilibrium critical phenomena and the high-precision determination of universal entanglement properties on both classical and quantum platforms, paving the way for probing the rich entanglement structure of quantum critical systems.
In this paper and its upcoming sequel, we study nonequilibrium dynamics in driven (1 + 1)-dimensional conformal field theories (CFTs) with periodic, quasiperiodic, and random driving.We study a soluble family of drives in which the Hamiltonian only involves the energy-momentum density spatially modulated at a single wavelength.The resulting time evolution is then captured by a Möbius coordinate transformation.In this paper, we establish the general framework and focus on the first two classes.In periodically driven CFTs, we generalize earlier work and study the generic features of entanglement and energy evolution in different phases, i.e., the heating and nonheating phases and the phase transition between them.In quasiperiodically driven CFTs, we mainly focus on the case of driving with a Fibonacci sequence.We find that (i) the nonheating phases form a Cantor set of measure zero; (ii) in the heating phase, the Lyapunov exponents (which characterize the growth rate of the entanglement entropy and energy) exhibit self-similarity, and can be arbitrarily small; (iii) the heating phase exhibits periodicity in the location of spatial structures at the Fibonacci times; (iv) one can find exactly the nonheating fixed point, where the entanglement entropy and energy oscillate at the Fibonacci numbers, but grow logarithmically and polynomially at the non-Fibonacci numbers; (v) for certain choices of driving Hamiltonians, the nonheating phases of the Fibonacci driving CFT can be mapped to the energy spectrum of electrons propagating in a Fibonacci quasicrystal.In addition, another quasiperiodically driven CFT with an Aubry-André-type sequence is also studied.We compare the CFT results to lattice calculations and find remarkable agreement.
While non-Hermitian bulk systems and their sensitivity to boundary conditions have been extensively studied, how a non-Hermitian boundary affects the entanglement structure of Hermitian critical systems remains largely unexplored. Here we present a fully analytical framework by exactly solving a Hermitian gapless chain with a single non-Hermitian impurity acting as a non-Hermitian boundary. When the entanglement cut is placed at the impurity, we uncover a sharp \emph{entanglement complexification transition}: the logarithmic entanglement entropy retains its scaling form, but the effective central charge evolves from real to complex values, accompanied by a spectral collapse of the correlation matrix. We demonstrate that the real regime follows analytic continuation from a unitary defect conformal field theory (CFT), whereas the complex regime lies entirely beyond this framework. For the latter, we derive an analytical formula in perfect agreement with numerics. Our results reveal that a single non-Hermitian impurity can drive a Hermitian critical system into a nonunitary defect-CFT phase, establishing a rare analytically solvable platform for boundary non-Hermiticity.
In this sequel (to [Phys. Rev. Res. 3, 023044(2021)], arXiv:2006.10072), we study randomly driven (1+1) ( 1 + 1 ) dimensional conformal field theories (CFTs), a family of quantum many-body systems with soluble non-equilibrium quantum dynamics. The sequence of driving Hamiltonians is drawn from an independent and identically distributed random ensemble. At each driving step, the deformed Hamiltonian only involves the energy-momentum density spatially modulated at a single wavelength and therefore induces a Möbius transformation on the complex coordinates. The non-equilibrium dynamics is then determined by the corresponding sequence of Möbius transformations, from which the Lyapunov exponent \lambda_L λ L is defined. We use Furstenberg’s theorem to classify the dynamical phases and show that except for a few exceptional points that do not satisfy Furstenberg’s criteria, the random drivings always lead to a heating phase with the total energy growing exponentially in the number of driving steps n n and the subsystem entanglement entropy growing linearly in n n with a slope proportional to central charge c c and the Lyapunov exponent \lambda_L λ L . On the contrary, the subsystem entanglement entropy at an exceptional point could grow as \sqrt{n} n while the total energy remains to grow exponentially. In addition, we show that the distributions of the operator evolution and the energy density peaks are also useful characterizations to distinguish the heating phase from the exceptional points: the heating phase has both distributions to be continuous, while the exceptional points could support finite convex combinations of Dirac measures depending on their specific type. In the end, we compare the field theory results with the lattice model calculations for both the entanglement and energy evolution and find remarkably good agreement.