This thesis investigates the properties of entanglement in one-dimensional many-body systems. In the first part, the non-equilibrium dynamics following a sudden global quench are exploited for the purpose of generating long-range entanglement. A number of initial states are considered. It is shown that the dynamics following the considered quench can be mapped to the problem of a state transfer. The quench can then be optimised by exploiting the literature about quantum state transfer to generate maximal long-range entanglement and maximal block entropy. \nIn the second part of the thesis, a spin chain emulation of the two-channel, Kondo (2CK) model is proposed. Studying the local magnetisation and susceptibility we show that the spin-only emulation truly represent the two-channel Kondo model and extract the Kondo temperature. A detailed entanglement analysis is presented. Using density matrix renormalisation group (DMRG), which allow for real space analysis, Kondo temperature and Kondo length are evaluated. An entanglement measure, namely the negativity, as well as the Schmidt gap are used as possible order parameters predicting the critical point. An extensive analysis of the block entropy of the system is presented for different limiting values of Kondo coupling. A universal scaling of the impurity contribution to the entropy is found and the 2CK residual entropy is extracted. \nThe last part explores quench dynamics in Kondo systems using time-dependent DMRG. For a quench in the Kondo coupling a travelling and breathing clouds are ob-served. A measurement-induced dynamics lead to an oscillation between an effective singlet and triplet states of the impurity and the Kondo cloud. Kondo temperature can be extracted from the frequency of the oscillation.
This thesis investigates the properties of entanglement in one-dimensional many-body systems. In the first part, the non-equilibrium dynamics following a sudden global quench are exploited for the purpose of generating long-range entanglement. A number of initial states are considered. It is shown that the dynamics following the considered quench can be mapped to the problem of a state transfer. The quench can then be optimised by exploiting the literature about quantum state transfer to generate maximal long-range entanglement and maximal block entropy. \nIn the second part of the thesis, a spin chain emulation of the two-channel, Kondo (2CK) model is proposed. Studying the local magnetisation and susceptibility we show that the spin-only emulation truly represent the two-channel Kondo model and extract the Kondo temperature. A detailed entanglement analysis is presented. Using density matrix renormalisation group (DMRG), which allow for real space analysis, Kondo temperature and Kondo length are evaluated. An entanglement measure, namely the negativity, as well as the Schmidt gap are used as possible order parameters predicting the critical point. An extensive analysis of the block entropy of the system is presented for different limiting values of Kondo coupling. A universal scaling of the impurity contribution to the entropy is found and the 2CK residual entropy is extracted. \nThe last part explores quench dynamics in Kondo systems using time-dependent DMRG. For a quench in the Kondo coupling a travelling and breathing clouds are ob-served. A measurement-induced dynamics lead to an oscillation between an effective singlet and triplet states of the impurity and the Kondo cloud. Kondo temperature can be extracted from the frequency of the oscillation.
In this PhD thesis we investigate some properties of one-dimensional quantum systems, focusing on two important aspects of integrable models: Their entanglement properties at equilibrium and their dynamical correlators after a quantum quench. The first part of the thesis will therefore be devoted to the study of the entanglement entropy in one-dimensional integrable systems, with a special focus on the XYZ spin-1/2 chain, which, in addition to being integrable, is also an interacting theory with non perturbative solutions. We derive its bipartite Renyi entropies in the thermodynamic limit and its behaviour in different phases and for different values of the mass-gap is analysed, both analytically and numerically. In particular it is worth mentioning that the numerical analysis of the entropies of the XYZ model presented in this dissertation has never been published in literature. In the second part of the thesis we study the dynamics of correlators after a quantum quench, preparing the system in a squeezed coherent initial state. The emphasis will be on the Transverse Field Ising Chain and the O(3) non-linear sigma model, the latter studied by means of the semi-classical theory, the former by a form-factor approach. Moreover in the last chapter we outline a general result about the dynamics of correlation functions of local observables after a quantum quench. In particular we show that if there are not long-range interactions in the final Hamiltonian, then the dynamics of the model at long times (non equal- time correlations) is described by the same statistical ensemble that describes its statical properties (equal-time correlations). For the Transverse Field Ising Chain this result means that its dynamics is described by a Generalized Gibbs Ensemble.
One of the most important predictions of quantum mechanics is the existence of quantum entanglement. Since the inception of quantum theory, the study of entanglement has become ubiquitous in several branches of physics, from high energy to condensed matter physics and quantum information. To this avail, different measures of entanglement in quantum systems have been introduced. The most successful ones are the von Neumann and the Rényi entanglement entropies, which have been heavily studied both in lattice models and in quantum field theories (QFTs). A different, more complete characterization of entanglement is provided by the entanglement (or modular) Hamiltonian, defined as the logarithm of the reduced density matrix. One of the key property of this operator is that, under generic conditions, in 1+1-dimensional conformal field theories (CFTs) presents a local and few-body structure. Beyond just being of theoretical interest, this property has been recently used to efficiently construct the ground state of spin chains in quantum simulators. A recently introduced generalisation of the entanglement Hamiltonian is the negativity Hamiltonian, a non-Hermitian operator which is more useful for mixed states and tripartite entanglement. In this thesis we study these quantifications in many-body quantum systems and in QFTs. In the first part of the thesis, we focus on fermionic systems at equilibrium, and we obtain analytical expressions for the entanglement and the negativity Hamiltonians in the massless Dirac fermion QFT, both in presence of boundaries and at finite temperature. We compare these predictions in the continuum QFT with numerical calculations on the lattice, showing that a proper comparison requires a non-trivial continuum limit of the lattice expression, which we detail. We also investigate a lattice realisation of a non-unitary CFT, the bc-ghost theory, showing that the entanglement Hamiltonian presents an additional term with respect to the unitary case. In the second part, we study the entanglement entropies in an integrable QFT, the massless renormalisation group flow from the tricritical to the critical Ising CFT, demonstrating that the entropy is monotonically decreasing under the renormalisation group flow, as expected from the entropic c-theorem. In the third part we consider out-of-equilibrium problems. We study the melting of a domain wall configuration, computing analytically the entanglement Hamiltonian and showing that the insertion of a defect dramatically modifies the entanglement properties, changing the growth of the entropies from logarithmic to linear in time. Finally, we study generic quantum quenches in free fermionic theories, using the celebrated quasiparticle picture to obtain a prediction for the evolution of the entanglement Hamiltonian during the quench.
Quantum quench is a non-equilibrium process where the Hamiltonian is suddenly changed during the quantum evolution. The change can be made by spatially local perturbations (local quench) or globally switching to a completely different Hamiltonian (global quench). This thesis investigates the post-quench non-equilibrium dynamics with an emphasis on the time dependence of the quantum entanglement. We inspect the scaling of entanglement entropy (EE) to learn how correlation and entanglement built up in a quench. We begin with two local quench examples. In Chap. 2, we apply a local operator to the groundstate of the quantum Lifshitz model and monitor the change of the EE. We find that the entanglement grows according to the dynamical exponent z = 2 and then saturates to the scaling dimension of the perturbing operator -- a value representing its strength. In Chap. 3, we study the evolution after connecting two different one-dimensional critical chains at their ends. The Loschmidt echo which measures the similarity between the evolved state and the initial one decays with a power law, whose exponent is the scaling dimension of the defect (junction). Among other conclusions, we see that the local quench dynamics contain universal information of the (critical) theory. In the global quench scenario, the change of the Hamiltonian affects all parts of the system. In this thesis, we focus on the global chaotic quench driven by generic non-integrable Hamiltonians. In Chap. 4, we propose to use the operator entanglement entropy of the unitary operator as a probe. Its fast linear entanglement production is sharply contrasted to the slow logarithmic spreading of the many-body localized system. The entanglement saturation suggests that the evolution operator in the long time can be modeled by a random unitary matrix. In Chap. 5, we construct a random tensor network which consists of random unitary matrices connected locally to model chaotic evolution with local interactions. We find that the entanglement dynamics is mapped to the statistical mechanics of interacting random walks. This appealing emergent picture allows us to understand the universal linear growth as well as the fluctuations of entanglement in a chaotic quench.
The study carried in this thesis concerns the dynamics of out-of-equilibrium quantum systems, and more particularly their entanglement properties. Indeed, entanglement became a fundamental concept in modern physics, especially with the development of quantum information. We have in a first part studied the dynamics of a model of bosons on a lattice after the quench of their trapping potential. In the hard-core limit, we developed an hydrodynamical theory which perfectly reproduced the observed behavior. Then, we have looked at the dynamics of two defect spins coupled to an Ising chain. When these defects have been prepared into a separable state, we have established a formula giving the evolution of the reduced density matrix, allowing us to have access to the entanglement create through the coupling to the chain. We considered then the case of two initially entangled defect spins, and we studied the influence of a non-equilibrium environment on the disentanglement properties. Finally, the last part of this thesis is devoted to the study of a system coupled to an environment by means of the repeated interactions process. We studied the relaxation of the system in two different time regimes. For short times, the state is well described by a non-equilibrium-steady-state, in which we highlighted the scaling properties of some observables. For long times, the system reaches an equilibrium steady state made of a product of Bell states
We investigate the entanglement properties of the Kondo spin chain when it is prepared in its ground state as well as its dynamics following a single bond quench. We show that a true measure of entanglement such as negativity enables to characterize the unique features of the gapless Kondo regime. We determine the spatial extent of the Kondo screening cloud and propose an ansatz for the ground state in the Kondo regime accessible to this spin chain; we also demonstrate that the impurity spin is indeed maximally entangled with the Kondo cloud. We exploit these features of the entanglement in the gapless Kondo regime to show that a single local quench at one end of a Kondo spin chain may always induce a fast and long lived oscillatory dynamics, which establishes a high quality entanglement between the individual spins at the opposite ends of the chain. This entanglement is a footprint of the presence of the Kondo cloud and may be engineered so as to attain - even for very large chains- a constant high value independent of the length; in addition, it is thermally robust. To better evidence the remarkable peculiarities of the Kondo regime, we carry a parallel analysis of the entanglement properties of the Kondo spin chain model in the gapped dimerised regime where these remarkable features are absent.
Strongly correlated systems, i.e., quantum materials for which the interactions between its constituents are strong, are good candidates for the development of applications based on quantum-mechanical principles, such as quantum computers. Two paradigmatic models of strongly correlated systems are heavy-fermionic systems and one-dimensional spin-12 systems, with and without quenched disorder. In the past decade, improvement in computational methods and a vast enhancement in computational power has made it possible to study these systems in a a non-perturbative manner. In this thesis we present state-of-the-art numerical methods to investigate the properties of strongly correlated systems, and we apply these methods to solve a couple of selected problems in quantum condensed matter theory. We start by revisiting the phase diagram of the Falicov-Kimball model on the square lattice which can be considered as a heavy-fermionic systems. This model describes an interplay between conduction electrons and heavy electrons and reveals several distinct metal-insulator phase transitions. Using a lattice Monte-Carlo method, we study the transport properties of the model. Our analysis describes the role of temperature and interaction strength on the metal-insulator phase transitions in the Falicov-Kimball model. The second part of the thesis investigate the spatial structure of the entanglement in ground and thermal statesof the transverse-field Ising chain. We use the logarithmic negativity as a measure for the entanglement between two disjoint blocks. We investigate how logarithmic negativity depends on the spatial separation between two blocks, which can be viewed as the entanglement analog of a spatial correlation function. We find sharp entanglement thresholds at a critical distance beyond which the logarithmic negativity vanishes exactly and thus the two blocks become unentangled. Our results hold even in the presence of long-ranged quantum correlations, i.e., at the system’s quantum critical point. Using Time-Evolving Block Decimation (TEBD), we explore this feature as a function of temperature and size of the two blocks. We present a simple model to describe our numerical observations. In the last part of this thesis, we introduce an order parameter for a many-body localized spin-glass (MBL-SG) phase. We show that many-body localized spin-glass order can also be detected from two-site reduced density matrices, which we use to construct an eigenstate spin-glass order parameter. We find that this eigenstate spin-glass order parameter captures spin-glass phases in random Ising chains, both in many-body eigenstates as well as in the nonequilibrium dynamics, from a local in time measurement. We discuss how our results can be used to observe MBL-SG order within current experiments in Rydberg atoms and trapped ion systems.