Relaxation phenomena in a class of nondissipative systems with two highly disparate time scales (i.e., Brownian systems) have unique commonalities quantifiable via two scalars. It is shown that the exactly solvable problem of the dynamics of a weakly linked impurity spin in a s=1/2 XY chain belongs to this dynamical universality class and so does that of a heavy mass in an infinite harmonic oscillator chain and a spinless quasi two-dimensional attractive Fermi gas in the long-wavelength limit. The case of the strongly linked impurity in the XY chain is also discussed along with the corresponding limits in the harmonic oscillator chain and the electron-gas problems. \textcopyright{} 1996 The American Physical Society.
Relaxation phenomena in a class of nondissipative systems with two highly disparate time scales (i.e., Brownian systems) have unique commonalities quantifiable via two scalars. It is shown that the exactly solvable problem of the dynamics of a weakly linked impurity spin in a s=1/2 XY chain belongs to this dynamical universality class and so does that of a heavy mass in an infinite harmonic oscillator chain and a spinless quasi two-dimensional attractive Fermi gas in the long-wavelength limit. The case of the strongly linked impurity in the XY chain is also discussed along with the corresponding limits in the harmonic oscillator chain and the electron-gas problems. \textcopyright{} 1996 The American Physical Society.
The equilibrium physics of quantum impurities frequently involves a universal crossover from weak to strong reservoir-impurity coupling, characterized by single-parameter scaling and an energy scale TK (Kondo temperature) that breaks scale invariance. For the noninteracting resonant level model, the nonequilibrium time evolution of the Loschmidt echo after a local quantum quench was recently computed explicitly [R. Vasseur, K. Trinh, S. Haas, and H. Saleur, Phys. Rev. Lett. 110, 240601 (2013)]. It shows single-parameter scaling with variable TKt. Here, we scrutinize whether similar universal dynamics can be observed in various interacting quantum impurity systems. Using density matrix and functional renormalization group approaches, we analyze the time evolution resulting from abruptly coupling two noninteracting Fermi or interacting Luttinger liquid leads via a quantum dot or a direct link. We also consider the case of a single Luttinger liquid lead suddenly coupled to a quantum dot. We investigate whether the field-theory predictions for the universal scaling as well as for the large-time behavior successfully describe the time evolution of the Loschmidt echo and the entanglement entropy of microscopic models. Our study shows that for the considered local quench protocols the above quantum impurity models fall into a class of problems for which the nonequilibrium dynamics can largely be understood based on the knowledge of the corresponding equilibrium physics.
Entanglement fluctuations associated with the Schrödinger evolution of wave functions offer a unique perspective on various fundamental issues ranging from quantum thermalization to state preparation in quantum devices. Very recently, a subset of the present authors showed that, in a class of free-fermion lattice models and interacting spin chains, entanglement dynamics enters into a new regime at long time, with entanglement probes displaying persistent temporal fluctuations, whose statistics falls into the seemingly disparate paradigm of mesoscopic fluctuations in condensed-matter physics. This motivates us to revisit here entanglement dynamics of a canonical bosonic model in many-body physics, i.e., a coupled harmonic oscillator chain. We find that when the system is driven out of equilibrium, the long-time entanglement dynamics exhibits strictly the same statistical behaviors as those of free-fermion models. Specifically, irrespective of entanglement probes and microscopic parameters, the statistical distribution of entanglement fluctuations is flanked by asymmetric tails: sub-Gaussian for upward fluctuations and sub-Gamma for downward; moreover, the variance exhibits a crossover from the scaling ∼ 1 / L to ∼ L A 3 / L 2 as the subsystem size L A increases ( L the total system size). This insensitivity to the particle statistics, dubbed boson-fermion universality, is contrary to the common wisdom that statistical phenomena of a many-body nature depend strongly on particle statistics. Together with our previous work, the present study indicates rich fluctuation phenomena in long-time entanglement dynamics that await in-depth exploration.
We numerically study the relaxation dynamics of impurity-host systems, focusing on the presence of long-lived metastable states in the nonequilibrium dynamics after an initial excitation of the impurities. In generic systems, an excited impurity coupled to a large bath at zero temperature is expected to relax and approach its ground state over time. However, certain exceptional cases exhibit metastability, where the system remains in an excited state on timescales largely exceeding the typical relaxation time. We study this phenomenon for three prototypical impurity models: a tight-binding quantum model of independent spinless fermions on a lattice with two stub impurities, a classical-spin Heisenberg model with two weakly coupled classical impurity spins, and a tight-binding quantum model of independent electrons with two classical impurity spins. Through numerical integration of the fundamental equations of motion, we find that all three models exhibit similar qualitative behavior: complete relaxation for nearest-neighbor impurities and incomplete or strongly delayed relaxation for next-nearest-neighbor impurities. The underlying mechanisms leading to this behavior differ between models and include impurity-induced bound states, emergent approximately conserved local observables, and exact cancellation of local and nonlocal dissipation effects. Published by the American Physical Society 2024
The relaxation of a many-body system is still a challenging problem that has not been well understood. In this work we exactly calculate the dynamics of the quantum XY model with boundary dissipation, in which the density matrix in terms of Majorana operators can be decoupled into independent subspaces Ki represented by different number of Majorana fermions. The relaxation is characterized by multiple timescales, and in the long-time limit it is determined by the single-particle relaxation process in a typical timescale T∗. For the bulk bands, we find ${T}^{*}\ensuremath{\propto}{N}^{3}/\ensuremath{\gamma}{n}^{2}$ in the weak dissipation limit and ${T}^{*}\ensuremath{\propto}\ensuremath{\gamma}{N}^{3}/{n}^{2}$ in the strong dissipation limit, where N is the chain length, $\ensuremath{\gamma}$ is the dissipation rate, and n is the band index. For the edge modes, ${T}^{*}\ensuremath{\propto}1/\ensuremath{\gamma}$ indicates the most vulnerable to dissipation in the long-chain limit. These results are counterintuitive because it means any weak dissipation can induce strong relaxation, while strong dissipation can induce weak relaxation. We find that these two limits correspond to two different physics, which are explained based on the first- and second-order perturbation theory in an equivalent non-Hermitian model. Finally, we show that even in the long-chain limit with weak dissipation, the relaxation may exhibit strong odd-even effect, which can be washed out by the strong dissipation. These results shed new insight into the dynamics of topological qubits in the environment, and the mechanism for many-body dissipation may also have universal significance in understanding the many-body dissipation in the other models.
In this report we discuss the dynamical response of heavy quantum impurities immersed in a Fermi gas at zero and at finite temperature. Studying both the frequency and the time domain allows one to identify interaction regimes that are characterized by distinct many-body dynamics. From this theoretical study a picture emerges in which impurity dynamics is universal on essentially all time scales, and where the high-frequency few-body response is related to the long-time dynamics of the Anderson orthogonality catastrophe by Tan relations. Our theoretical description relies on different and complementary approaches: functional determinants give an exact numerical solution for time- and frequency-resolved responses, bosonization provides accurate analytical expressions at low temperatures, and the theory of Toeplitz determinants allows one to analytically predict response up to high temperatures. Using these approaches we predict the thermal decoherence rate of the fermionic system and prove that within the considered model the fastest rate of long-time decoherence is given by [Formula: see text]. We show that Feshbach resonances in cold atomic systems give access to new interaction regimes where quantum effects can prevail even in the thermal regime of many-body dynamics. The key signature of this phenomenon is a crossover between different exponential decay rates of the real-time Ramsey signal. It is shown that the physics of the orthogonality catastrophe is experimentally observable up to temperatures [Formula: see text] where it leaves its fingerprint in a power-law temperature dependence of thermal spectral weight and we review how this phenomenon is related to the physics of heavy ions in liquid [Formula: see text]He and the formation of Fermi polarons. The presented results are in excellent agreement with recent experiments on LiK mixtures, and we predict several new phenomena that can be tested using currently available experimental technology.
We investigate the equilibrium properties of a quantum Brownian particle moving in a periodic potential, specifically addressing the nature of the dissipation-driven Schmid transition in the Ohmic regime. By employing World-Line Monte Carlo in the path-integral formalism and introducing a specific binary order parameter, we demonstrate that the transition belongs to the Berezinskii-Kosterlitz-Thouless universality class. This classification is substantiated through finite-size scaling analysis that reveals the characteristic logarithmic decay of the correlation functions associated with the order parameter at the critical point. Quantum phase transition turns out to be extremely fragile: it disappears in both over- and sub-Ohmic dissipation regimes. Crucially, we find that the presence of the periodic potential does not alter the localization properties in the sub-Ohmic and super-Ohmic regimes, where the system exhibits the same qualitative behavior as the free quantum Brownian particle. These findings highlight that the emergence of critical behavior is strictly governed by the low-frequency form of the environmental spectral function, which determines the long-range temporal decay of the dissipative kernel.