In the last years the impressive progress on the experimental side led to a variety of new experiments allowing to address systems out of equilibrium.In this way the behavior of such systems far from equilibrium is no longer a purely theoretical issue but indeed observable.New experimental techniques, like particles trapped in optical lattices, render a realization of quantum systems with nearly arbitrary system parameters possible and provide a possibility to study their time evolution.Systems out of equilibrium are characterized by the fact, that these systems are in highly excited states giving rise to totally new fascinating properties.In the present thesis one-and two-dimensional fermionic Hubbard models out of equilibrium are discussed.The system is taken out of equilibrium by a so-called interaction quench.At the beginning the system is prepared in the groundstate of the non-interacting Hamiltonian.At a time t the interaction between the fermions is suddenly turned on so that the time evolution is governed by the whole, interacting Hamiltonian.Hence the system is prepared in the groundstate of one Hamiltonian but evolves according to a di_erent Hamiltonian.Consequently the system ends up in a highly excited state.To describe such a system a method based on an expansion of the Heisenberg equations of motion to highest order possible is developed in this thesis.This method provides an exact description of the time evolution on short and intermediate time scales after the quench.As the method reveal exact results and does not rely on any perturbative assumption, a study of arbitrarily large interaction strengths is possible.Besides, the method is one of the few methods capable of two-dimensional systems.In the following the method used in this thesis is explained and advantages and disadvantages of the approach are thematized.For this purpose the results of the developed iterated equation of motion approach are compared to results obtained in calculation up to second order in the interaction.Then the dynamics of the onedimensional model is discussed with a focus on the relation of the results derived by the iterated equations of motion approach to results obtained by bosonization theory, the behavior for strong interactions and the dynamical transition from the weak to the strong quench regime.Furthermore, the Hubbard model is studied on a two-dimensional square lattice.This model is fundamentally di_erent from the one-dimensional model: In contrast to the one-dimensional model the two-dimensional model is not integrable allowing a true relaxation of the system.For this system a calculation up to second order in the interaction is performed and compared to the results of the iterated equation of motion approach.Besides, the time evolution of the momentum distribution and the influence of doping on the dynamics is studied.Moreover, a first estimate for relaxation times is provided without relying on the assumption of a mixed state.
In the last years the impressive progress on the experimental side led to a variety of new experiments allowing to address systems out of equilibrium.In this way the behavior of such systems far from equilibrium is no longer a purely theoretical issue but indeed observable.New experimental techniques, like particles trapped in optical lattices, render a realization of quantum systems with nearly arbitrary system parameters possible and provide a possibility to study their time evolution.Systems out of equilibrium are characterized by the fact, that these systems are in highly excited states giving rise to totally new fascinating properties.In the present thesis one-and two-dimensional fermionic Hubbard models out of equilibrium are discussed.The system is taken out of equilibrium by a so-called interaction quench.At the beginning the system is prepared in the groundstate of the non-interacting Hamiltonian.At a time t the interaction between the fermions is suddenly turned on so that the time evolution is governed by the whole, interacting Hamiltonian.Hence the system is prepared in the groundstate of one Hamiltonian but evolves according to a di_erent Hamiltonian.Consequently the system ends up in a highly excited state.To describe such a system a method based on an expansion of the Heisenberg equations of motion to highest order possible is developed in this thesis.This method provides an exact description of the time evolution on short and intermediate time scales after the quench.As the method reveal exact results and does not rely on any perturbative assumption, a study of arbitrarily large interaction strengths is possible.Besides, the method is one of the few methods capable of two-dimensional systems.In the following the method used in this thesis is explained and advantages and disadvantages of the approach are thematized.For this purpose the results of the developed iterated equation of motion approach are compared to results obtained in calculation up to second order in the interaction.Then the dynamics of the onedimensional model is discussed with a focus on the relation of the results derived by the iterated equations of motion approach to results obtained by bosonization theory, the behavior for strong interactions and the dynamical transition from the weak to the strong quench regime.Furthermore, the Hubbard model is studied on a two-dimensional square lattice.This model is fundamentally di_erent from the one-dimensional model: In contrast to the one-dimensional model the two-dimensional model is not integrable allowing a true relaxation of the system.For this system a calculation up to second order in the interaction is performed and compared to the results of the iterated equation of motion approach.Besides, the time evolution of the momentum distribution and the influence of doping on the dynamics is studied.Moreover, a first estimate for relaxation times is provided without relying on the assumption of a mixed state.
In the last years the impressive progress on the experimental side led to a variety of new experiments allowing to address systems out of equilibrium. In this way the behavior of such systems far from equilibrium is no longer a purely theoretical issue but indeed observable. New experimental techniques, like particles trapped in optical lattices, render a realization of quantum systems with nearly arbitrary system parameters possible. Thus a study of interaction quenches where the interaction between the particles is suddenly switched on is possible. As these quenches take the system far from equilibrium the dynamics is governed by highly excited states, which leads to totally new fascinating phenomena. In this work interaction quenches in fermionic Hubbard models are studied in one and two dimensions allowing to study the influence of integrability on the dynamics of the system. Besides, the influence of doping on the time evolution of the system is calculated.
The study of the interplay between interaction-induced correlations and nonequilibrium initial conditions in many-body systems has recently attracted a lot of attention. New experimental techniques provide high control over many-body systems and systematic access to their nonequilibrium regime. In many systems the nonequilibrium properties of a Fermi liquid can be relevant. A first approach to their understanding is the main content of this thesis. At the beginning, nonequilibrium phenomena, Landau's theory of a Fermi liquid, the Hubbard model, time evolution in quantum mechanics, related experiments, and the flow equation method are reviewed. The key observation of this thesis, namely a characteristic mismatch of expectation values in equilibrium and nonequilibrium, is first illustrated for the squeezed oscillator. For this one-particle model Hamiltonian the perturbative approach can be compared with the exact solution and it is shown that the mismatch holds even beyond perturbation theory. Afterwards these observations are generalized to a larger class of one-particle models. Then the nonequilibrium behavior of a Fermi liquid is examined by analyzing the Fermi liquid phase of the Hubbard model in more than one dimension. After a sudden switch-on of a weak two-particle interaction to the noninteracting Fermi gas the relaxation of the many-body system is observed. For this purpose, the flow equation transformation is implemented for the Hubbard Hamiltonian. Then the discussion of the momentum distribution function and of the kinetic energy displays a three-step relaxation behavior of the Fermi liquid from the initial perturbation until thermalization is reached. Firstly, the sudden switch inserts excitation energy into the system which drives the following dynamics. Then a rapid initial build-up of correlations is caused by initial dephasing and leads to the establishment of a quasiparticle picture. By that the system enters into a quasi-stationary state which can be long-lasting for weak interaction. This state shows prethermalization of the kinetic energy which already has relaxed to its final values. However, the momentum distribution still resembles a zero temperature Fermi liquid. Its later relaxation on a second time scale is caused by a residual two-particle interaction which allows for scattering processes and can be described by a quantum Boltzmann equation. The physical origin of this delayed relaxation can be traced back to an interplay of translational invariance of the Hubbard model and the Pauli principle for fermions; together they restrict the phase space for scattering events. Comparing with similar work I conjecture on the generic nature of the findings made for the quenched Fermi liquid in other many-body systems. Finally I point out to the potential relevance of the delayed relaxation for the observation of further nonequilibrium phenomena, for instance in BCS systems. In order to extend the study of sudden switching to arbitrary switching processes the calculation is repeated using the Keldysh perturbation theory. First evaluations for a linear increase of the interaction strength are given. Extensions of this work are suggested and may motivate further research.
Experimental advances have made ultracold atoms in optical lattices a favourable setting to study out-of-equilibrium phenomena and attracted considerable attention in recent years.These systems are highly versatile in that experimental parameters can be tuned over a wide range of values in real time.This facilitates the study of quantum quenches, in which parameters in the corresponding Hamiltonian are varied in time faster than the system can respond adiabatically.Such protocols open the door to a rich range of many-body physics and have been studied intensely both theoretically and experimentally.The Bose-Hubbard model (BHM) has been shown to describe interacting ultracold bosons in an optical lattice, allowing the opportunity for experiments to probe the out-of-equilibrium dynamics of the model.The BHM is a particularly convenient context for studying quantum quenches as it displays a quantum phase transition between superfluid and Mott-insulator phases.In this thesis, we develop a strong-coupling approach that allows the study of correlations in space and time in both the superfluid and Mott-insulating phases of the BHM.Specifically, we obtain a two-particle irreducible (2PI) effective action within the contourtime formalism that allows for a description of both equilibrium and out-of-equilibrium phenomena.We derive equations of motion for both the superfluid order parameter and the single-particle many-body Green's functions.First, we assess the accuracy of our formalism by studying the equilibrium solution for the homogeneous BHM and comparing our results to existing strong-coupling methods as well as to exact methods where possible.We then consider homogeneous systems that are initially thermalized in the Mott phase, and which are then subjected to quenches.We solve numerically the equations of motion for this scenario and calculate the single-particle density matrix.We demonstrate a Lieb-Robinson-like maximal propagation velocity for the spreading of single-particle correlations in one, two, and three dimensions.We study the dependence of the maximal propagation velocity on the quench protocol, chemical potential, temperature, and dimensionality.We compare our results to exact methods, existing strong-coupling approaches, and experiments where possible.Lastly, we extend our strong-coupling approach to the disordered BHM and derive equations of motion for the disorder-averaged single-particle Green's function.We discuss how these equations of motion can be used to study the phase stability of many-body localization in the disordered BHM for dimensions higher than one.
We study the time evolution of two fermionic one-dimensional models (spinless fermions with nearest-neighbor repulsion and the Hubbard model) exposed to an interaction quench for short and moderate times. The method used to calculate the time dependence is a semi-numerical approach based on the Heisenberg equation of motion. We compare the results of this approach with the results obtained by bosonization implying power law behavior. Indeed, we find that power laws describe our results well, but our results raise the issue of which exponents occur. For spinless fermions, it seems that the Tomonaga–Luttinger parameters work well, which also describe the equilibrium low-energy physics. But for the Hubbard model this is not the case. Instead, we find that exponents from the bosonization around the initial state work well. Finally, we discuss what can be expected for the long-time behavior.
In this work, we study the non-equilibrium dynamics of low-dimensional strongly correlated quantum systems, which in our case are generated by sudden and time-dependent quantum quenches. Such non-equilibrium dynamics are a particularly difficult problem, because the time evolution of the initial many-body quantum state, which is governed by the post-quench Hamiltonian, is highly non-trivial. On top of that, applying an operator to this many-body quantum state in order to calculate its expectation values, typically creates an intricate set of excitations. Throughout the thesis, we furthermore contrast the results that we have obtained using exact numerical methods for two microscopic models, namely the Heisenberg and Fermi-Hubbard chains, with results derived from the Luttinger liquid theory, which, in equilibrium, describes the universal behavior of the two models.In the second part of the thesis, we reduce the dimensionality even further and employ complementary numerical and analytical tools to examine the unusual non-equilibrium behavior of a ring-shaped quantum impurity hosting interacting spin-less fermions.
The study of quantum dynamics is an increasingly important aspect of atomic, molecular and optical physics, as well as condensed-matter physics and other disciplines. It is essential in order to understand non-equilibrium phenomena which do not fit within the framework of equilibrium thermodynamics, such as many-body localization, dynamical quantum phase transitions, and non-equilibrium steady states in driven-dissipative systems. However, the exact calculation of dynamical observables is extremely difficult in general for several reasons, which makes it challenging for theoretical predictions and analyses to keep pace with rapidly advancing experiments. In this thesis I use and develop several computational methods to investigate the dynamics of quantum many-body systems, with the two goals of better understanding the evolution of local observables and correlation functions in spin and Fermion systems as well as creating and testing more effective numerical methods for solving quantum dynamics problems. I explore quantum dynamics by using Hamiltonian parameter quenches in several commonly-used models in AMO physics and elsewhere: the Fermi-Hubbard model, the XXZ model, and the transverse-Ising model. The first represents a system of short-range interacting Fermions, while the latter two represent spin systems with different spin-spin couplings and magnetic field terms. All of these models can be realized in current experiments. First, I derive an exact solution for an extreme interaction quench in the Fermi-Hubbard model, from a strongly-interacting initial state to a noninteracting final Hamiltonian. From this result I show that there are nontrivial transient connected correlations, despite the fact that the system has very high temperature and a noninteracting Hamiltonian. Those features would suppress such correlations in equilibrium, but the dynamical correlations are still significant. Then, I develop and examine two numerical methods for solving dynamics of the spin expectation values and correlation functions in the transverse-Ising and XXZ models. Both methods rely on approximating a thermodynamically large system with a much smaller and more computationally tractable cluster of lattice sites, or a series of clusters. The first method is a dynamical numerical linked cluster expansion (NLCE). NLCEs have already been used successfully on systems in thermodynamic equilibrium, and I extended the technique to directly compute the dynamics of an observable after a quantum quench. I review the general NLCE method, describe my dynamical variant of it, and compute the quench dynamics of spin and correlation observables in the transverse-Ising and XXZ models. The second method, which I term the adaptive-boundary cluster method, relies on recently refined bounds on information propagation in quantum systems to choose a cluster of lattice sites that minimizes the finite size error bound of a dynamical computation. I briefly review these bounds, and describe a new algorithm which uses them to construct a cluster whose boundary is chosen according to a related error estimate. Such an adaptive-boundary cluster has the property that there exists a computable upper bound on the finite size error of observables measured at the cluster center, and this error bound is nearly minimal when compared to that of other clusters of the same size. I then compute the quench dynamics of spin and correlation observables in the transverse-Ising model using the adaptive boundary clusters. I apply this method to both uniform and strongly disordered systems. To evaluate the effectiveness of both dynamical NLCE and adaptive-boundary clusters, I compare the results obtained using them to results from a standard and general purpose numerical method: exact solvers applied a rectangular cluster with periodic boundary conditions. Both of the new methods usually converge faster and are more accurate than the standard method for comparable cluster sizes. This thesis illustrates that choosing numerical methods which take advantage of the geometric and entanglement structure of the initial state and Hamiltonian can substantially enhance our ability to study quantum dynamics, by reducing the computational cost of numerically exact solutions. I conclude with a discussion of various avenues for future research to build on this work.