The primary area, on which we focus in the thesis, are the out-of-equilibrium properties of quantum and classical systems. The playground we use to study those properties, are interacting integrable and solitonic systems, whose structure enables us to perform analytical calculations.
In the context of the out-of-equilibrium physics we focus on two questions. The first problem is related to the set of stationary states in quantum systems. The question is especially important in the context of the homogeneous quantum quenches, since it makes possible the calculations of expectation values of local observables. The building blocks of stationary states are quasilocal conserved quantities which constitute the information that is preserved under the time evolution. In the first part of the thesis we deal with the construction of quasilocal conserved quantities in one dimensional anisotropic Heisenberg model and bosonic models. Quasilocal charges are put in the context of the standard theory of integrability, which in turn allows for the calculation of physical quantities.
The second question we deal with are the transport properties of one dimensional systems. The connection between the local integrals of motion and ideal transport was established in 90's. Here we extend the connection to the diffusive transport. This enables us to obtain explicit lower bound on diffusion constant in Heisenberg model, which proves that the Heisenberg model is not an insulator at finite temperatures.
In the last chapter we deal with the transport properties of classical celular automata. The first example we consider is the gas of charged hard core interacting particles, and the second one the gas of interacting solitons. Explicit solution of the dynamics of local observables allows for the explicit calculation of transport coeffcients, and the solution of the inhomogeneous quench problem. Despite their simplicity, the models exhibit wide range of transport phenomena ranging from insulating, through diffusive to ballistic transport.
The primary area, on which we focus in the thesis, are the out-of-equilibrium properties of quantum and classical systems. The playground we use to study those properties, are interacting integrable and solitonic systems, whose structure enables us to perform analytical calculations.
In the context of the out-of-equilibrium physics we focus on two questions. The first problem is related to the set of stationary states in quantum systems. The question is especially important in the context of the homogeneous quantum quenches, since it makes possible the calculations of expectation values of local observables. The building blocks of stationary states are quasilocal conserved quantities which constitute the information that is preserved under the time evolution. In the first part of the thesis we deal with the construction of quasilocal conserved quantities in one dimensional anisotropic Heisenberg model and bosonic models. Quasilocal charges are put in the context of the standard theory of integrability, which in turn allows for the calculation of physical quantities.
The second question we deal with are the transport properties of one dimensional systems. The connection between the local integrals of motion and ideal transport was established in 90's. Here we extend the connection to the diffusive transport. This enables us to obtain explicit lower bound on diffusion constant in Heisenberg model, which proves that the Heisenberg model is not an insulator at finite temperatures.
In the last chapter we deal with the transport properties of classical celular automata. The first example we consider is the gas of charged hard core interacting particles, and the second one the gas of interacting solitons. Explicit solution of the dynamics of local observables allows for the explicit calculation of transport coeffcients, and the solution of the inhomogeneous quench problem. Despite their simplicity, the models exhibit wide range of transport phenomena ranging from insulating, through diffusive to ballistic transport.
In this Thesis I present the results of four research projects I carried out during my Ph.D. training at SISSA. The broad topic of my research was the mechanism of relaxation in isolated, integrable quantum systems. Roughly speaking, integrable quantum systems are one-dimensional lattice models or field theories that feature an extensively large number of conservation laws beyond energy and momentum conservation, which greatly influence their dynamical behaviour. Integrable systems have enjoyed a considerable interest in the last decade, mainly due to the development of ultracold atomic techniques. These techniques made it possible to implement experimentally a wealth of one-dimensional quantum models whose significance had been purely theoretical before. The theoretical interest in integrable systems stems in part from the fact that in many aspects they are exactly solvable. Exact analytical formulas are available for their spectrum and their equilibrium thermodynamic properties, creating an incentive to study analytically their non-equilibrium behaviour as well. Exact results for the dynamics of integrable systems may serve as a benchmark for confirming theories in statistical mechanics or testing approximative methods. To this day, computing analytically the entire time evolution of observables in a genuinely interacting integrable system is prohibitively difficult in general. In this Thesis, I concentrate on the description of the system at long times after it is brought out of equilibrium. Homogeneous, translationally invariant integrable systems are expected to relax to a stationary state, in which local observables are described by a generalization of the Gibbs ensemble that takes into consideration all the conservation laws beyond the energy. Two of the projects presented here concern this relaxed state. In Chapter 2, a method is presented for computing the Rényi entropies of the Generalized Gibbs Ensemble describing the relaxed state in the integrable Heisen- berg XXZ spin chain. Rényi entropies provide information about the relaxed state and its entanglement properties, going beyond the ordinary von Neumann thermo- dynamic entropy. The method presented there is very general; in principle it works in any integrable model and any translationally invariant thermodynamic macrostate. An alternative to the GGE in describing relaxed states after a quantum quench is the Quench Action approach. This approach is based on the explicit analytical knowledge of the overlaps between the initial state and the Hamiltonian eigenstates. In Chapter 3, this approach is generalized to a spin-1 integrable spin chain, the SU(3) invariant Lai–Sutherland model. The evolution of entanglement is then studied using the quasiparticle picture, which features ballistically propagating classical particle pairs carrying entanglement. If the requirement of translational invariance of the initial state is relaxed, various transport phenomena arise in integrable systems. The evolution of slowly varying, smoothly distributed states is described by a generalization of hydrodynamics, which takes into consideration the infinitely many local conservation laws. At the scale of non-diffusive, ballistic transport, the main feature of this generalized hydrodynamics (GHD) is the existence of continuity equations for the occupation number of each mode. Further two projects are presented in this Thesis which are concerned with GHD.I n Chapter 4, a numerical method is presented for computing the evolution of entanglement entropies within GHD. This method combines the quasiparticle picture of entanglement with a molecular dynamics simulation of GHD, the so-called fleagas. Numerical evidence is shown that this method reproduces previously known analytical results in GHD. Its versatility is demonstrated by computing another entanglement-related quantity, the mutual information, for which no analytical results are available. Finally, in Chapter 5, the GHD framework is generalized to a system of spin-1/2 fermions with repulsive contact interaction, the Yang–Gaudin model. It is shown that at low temperatures, the dynamics of the system is described by the superposition of two uncoupled, inhomogeneous conformal field theories. This fact can be interpreted as a separation of the spin and the charge degrees of freedom of the system.
Recent experimental advances on ultracold atomic gases and trapped ions have made it possible to simulate exactly solvable quantum systems of interacting particles. In particular, the feasibility of making rapid changes, so-called quantum quenches, to such set-ups has allowed experimentalists to probe non-equilibrium phenomena in closed interacting quantum systems. This, in turn, has spurred a considerable theoretical interest in quantum many-body systems out of equilibrium. In this thesis, we study non-equilibrium properties of quantum many-body systems in the framework of exactly solvable quantum field theory in one spatial dimension. Specific systems include interacting fermions described by the Luttinger model and effective descriptions of spin chains using conformal field theory (CFT). Special emphasis is placed on heat and charge transport, studied from the point of view of quench dynamics, and, in particular, the effects of breaking conformal symmetries on transport properties. Examples include the Luttinger model with non-local interactions, breaking Lorentz and scale invariance, and inhomogeneous CFT, which generalizes standard CFT in that the usual propagation velocity v is replaced by a function v(x) that depends smoothly on the position x, breaking translation invariance. The quench dynamics studied here is for quantum quenches between, in general, different smooth inhomogeneous systems. An example of this is the so-called smooth-profile protocol, in which the initial state is defined by, e.g., smooth inhomogeneous profiles of inverse temperature and chemical potential, and the time evolution is governed by a homogeneous Hamiltonian. Using this protocol, we compute exact analytical results for the full time evolution of the systems mentioned above. In particular, we derive finite-time results that are universal in the sense that the same relations between the non-equilibrium dynamics and the initial profiles hold for any unitary CFT. These results also make clear that heat and charge transport in standard CFT are purely ballistic. Finally, we propose and study an inhomogeneous CFT model with v(x) given by a random function. We argue that this model naturally emerges as an effective description of one-dimensional quantum many-body systems with certain static random impurities. Using tools from wave propagation in random media, we show that such impurities lead to normal and anomalous diffusive contributions to heat transport on top of the ballistic one known from standard CFT.
In this thesis, we investigated the evolution of low-dimensional quantum many-body systems through the lenses of their dynamics. The main tools we used are unitary dynamics and kinetic theory. The interest in this class of systems derives from the fact that they are dominated by the effects of interactions between fundamental constituents. In one dimension, the situation is even more dramatic: even the smallest interaction leads to a description that cannot be cast into a small perturbation of the initial model. Even though, a particular set of systems still allows for exact solutions; hence, they are deemed integrable and they allow for an infinite number of conserved currents. A simple way, that can also be performed experimentally, to drive many-body systems outside of the equilibrium is called quantum quench. It consists in switching instantaneously the parameters of the theory after the system is at the equilibrium and measuring an observable after the driving has occurred. Our contributions to the field amount to providing a full characterization of the evolution of the observables of an integrable system after a global quantum quench. We were also able to extend these results, valid in principle for relativistic theories, to the Lieb-Liniger model, prominent for the description of experimental setups, by the means of non-relativistic limit. For two-dimensional models, interactions are not changing the system from its foundations, although there are unexpected effects. A paradigmatic example is graphene: in a two-dimensional system where carriers are charged and massless, namely their dispersion relation does not have any gap and particles and holes can be freely excited from the thermal state, it is predicted that they are interacting via Coulomb force hundreds of times more than normal electrons in void. Hence, the system behaves in a completely different way from electrons in quantum electrodynamics: for instance, there are additional modes which are called plasmons that are also massless but neutral. They represent collective excitations of the model, as oscillations in the local density of charge. This system is not integrable but still strongly interacting; solving it as we do for one-dimensional systems is not possible. The role of conservation laws is a common theme of this thesis. In the example above exposed, total charge, momentum and energy are conserved in the pristine model, but in presence of impurities and defects they dissipate. The evolution of such quantities can though be derived exactly by the means of hydrodynamics. We were able to derive the equations that rule their evolution in time for any electronic system with two bands touching at the Dirac point. They are generalizations of the celebrated Navier-Stokes equations, and they differ from them only outside the compressible regime. We are able to show that the transport properties in the hydrodynamic regime strongly differ from the usual ballistic picture popularized by Drude and his model; this is captured for instance by violations of the Wiedemann-Franz ratio. Moreover, we prove that the role of interaction is prominent in the viscosity of these fluids.
This thesis investigates quantum-many body systems out of equilibrium in a variety of physically relevant and intriguing settings. It provides an overview of the recent developments in this field and based on the author’s recent review illuminates many interesting connections and summarises open questions. In this general framework, the various results of the author are embedded. While they often rely on advanced mathematics, great care is taken to present them in an intuitive way and most technical material is discussed separately in appendices. In the context of equilibration, work created as part of this thesis is able to capture the Gaussification of correlated initial states for a large class of free models. This allows to significantly extend equilibration results of free models, which are of crucial importance, as they provide reasonable relaxation time scales and immediately connect to our physical intuition in terms of ballistic spreading. Building on two surprising connections between static and dynamic features of Hamiltonians, which in general are hard to obtain, the results of this thesis further greatly contribute to the recent debate on the true nature of quantum many- body localisation. For those interacting models, we derive the localised structure of eigenstates from a dynamical suppression of information propagation on the low-energy sector. Further, we show how a non-degenerate spectrum, indicating the presence of interactions, and the existence of an approximately local constant of motion are sufficient to show information propagation, if arbitrary energies are allowed. In the context of quantum phase transitions, we continue such connections between static and dynamic features. We specifically investigate the Mott-superfluid transition of the Bose-Hubbard model and ask to what extent it has a universal dynamical signature. In a joint experimental, numerical and analytical effort, complex behaviour of these dynamics is uncovered, thus challenging the common believe that the Kibble-Zurek mechanism is sufficient to fully capture such transitions. We embed such experimental investigation in the recent debate on quantum simulators, which give the exciting perspective of solving notoriously and even provably hard problems efficiently in the laboratory. For such devices, we argue that the final read-out of the results is an important out- standing problem to be solved. We approach this issue in the case of a continuous quantum field, in which the notion of reconstructing the quantum state is even conceptually unclear. Based on tensor network methods, we demonstrate that in an experiment of ultra-cold atoms in a continuous setup, states can nevertheless efficiently be obtained. Thus, this thesis constitutes not only an important review of the field of quantum many-body systems out of equilibrium, but, using advanced mathematical and numerical tools, has significantly contributed to our understanding of various important out- standing questions in interacting many-body systems.
We review recent progress in understanding the notion of locality in integrable quantum lattice systems. The central concept are the so-called quasilocal conserved quantities, which go beyond the standard perception of locality. Two systematic procedures to rigorously construct families of quasilocal conserved operators based on quantum transfer matrices are outlined, specializing on anisotropic Heisenberg XXZ spin-1/2 chain. Quasilocal conserved operators stem from two distinct classes of representations of the auxiliary space algebra, comprised of unitary (compact) representations, which can be naturally linked to the fusion algebra and quasiparticle content of the model, and non-unitary (non-compact) representations giving rise to charges, manifestly orthogonal to the unitary ones. Various condensed matter applications in which quasilocal conservation laws play an essential role are presented, with special emphasis on their implications for anomalous transport properties (finite Drude weight) and relaxation to non-thermal steady states in the quantum quench scenario.
In this thesis two questions of equilibrium and non-equilibrium properties in many-body quantum mechanical systems are investigated. The first part is focused on probability distributions of quantum observables in many-body quantum systems. After an introduction to probability distributions, full counting statistics and the transverse field Ising model we give a brief overview over related experiments and then derive an expression for the probability distribution of the transverse field magnetization of a finite subsystem in any Gaussian state. We study the probability distribution in ground and thermal states as well as in a non-equilibrium setting after a quantum quench. We find an analytic expression for the time evolution after the quench and compare to numerics. The second part of the thesis is concerned with the stability of exact quasi-particle excitations of an integrable model after weak integrability breaking perturbations are introduced. For this we first discuss the stability of excitations in integrable systems and then give an introduction to the Heisenberg XXX-model in a magnetic field. After constructing exact excitations we calculate the decay rate in leading order perturbation theory using methods of integrability.