We develop a generic method to compute the dynamics induced by quenches in completely connected quantum systems. These models are expected to provide a mean-field description at least of the short-time dynamics of finite-dimensional systems. We apply our method to the Bose–Hubbard model, to a generalized Jaynes–Cummings model, and to the Ising model in a transverse field. We find that the quantum evolution can be mapped onto a classical effective dynamics, which involves only a few intensive observables. For some special parameters of the quench, peculiar dynamical transitions occur. They result from singularities of the classical effective dynamics and are reminiscent of the transition recently found in the fermionic Hubbard model. Finally, we discuss the generality of our results and possible extensions.
We study the out-of-equilibrium dynamics of one-dimensional quantum Ising-like systems, arising from sudden quenches of the Hamiltonian parameter
g driving quantum transitions between disordered and ordered phases. In particular, we consider quenches to values of
g around the critical value
gc, and mainly address the question whether, and how, the quantum transition leaves traces in the evolution of the transverse and longitudinal magnetizations during such a deep out-of-equilibrium dynamics. We shed light on the emergence of singularities in the thermodynamic infinite-size limit, likely related to the integrability of the model. Finite systems in periodic and open boundary conditions develop peculiar power-law finite-size scaling laws related to revival phenomena, but apparently unrelated to the quantum transition, because their main features are generally observed in quenches to generic values of
g. We also investigate the effects of dissipative interactions with an environment, modeled by a Lindblad equation with local decay and pumping dissipation operators within the quadratic fermionic model obtainable by a Jordan-Wigner mapping. Dissipation tends to suppress the main features of the unitary dynamics of closed systems. We finally address the effects of integrability breaking, due to further lattice interactions, such as in anisotropic next-to-nearest-neighbor Ising (ANNNI) models. We show that some qualitative features of the post-quench dynamics persist, in particular, the different behaviors when quenching to quantum ferromagnetic and paramagnetic phases, and the revival phenomena due to the finite size of the system.
We investigate the quantum dynamics generated by quantum quenches (QQs) of the Hamiltonian parameters in many-body systems, focusing on protocols that cross first-order and continuous quantum transitions, both in finite-size systems and in the thermodynamic limit. As a paradigmatic example, we consider the quantum Ising chain in the presence of homogeneous transverse (
g) and longitudinal (
h) magnetic fields. This model exhibits a continuous quantum transition (CQT) at
g=gc and
h=0, and first-order quantum transitions (FOQTs) driven by
h along the line
h=0 (
g<gc). In the integrable limit
h=0, the system can be mapped onto a quadratic fermionic theory; however, any nonvanishing longitudinal field breaks integrability and the spectrum of the resulting Hamiltonian is generally expected to enter a chaotic regime. We analyze QQs in which the longitudinal field is suddenly changed from a negative value
hi<0 to a positive value
hf>0. We focus on values of
hf such that the spectrum of the post-QQ Hamiltonian
H(g,hf) lies in the chaotic regime, where thermalization may emerge at asymptotically long times. We study the out-of-equilibrium dynamics for different values of
g, finding qualitatively distinct behaviors for
g>gc (where the chain is in the disordered phase), for
g=gc (QQ across the CQT), and for
g<gc (QQ across the FOQT line).
We study the nonequilibrium dynamics in the fermionic Hubbard model after a sudden change of the interaction strength. To this scope, we introduce a time-dependent variational approach in the spirit of the Gutzwiller ansatz. At the saddle-point approximation, we find at half filling a sharp transition between two different regimes of small and large coherent oscillations, separated by a critical line of quenches where the system is found to relax. Any finite doping washes out the transition, leaving aside just a sharp crossover. In order to investigate the role of quantum fluctuations, we map the model onto an auxiliary quantum Ising model in a transverse field coupled to free fermionic quasiparticles. Remarkably, the Gutzwiller approximation turns out to correspond to the mean-field decoupling of this model in the limit of infinite coordination lattices. The advantage is that we can go beyond mean field and include Gaussian fluctuations around the non-equilibrium mean-field dynamics. Unlike at equilibrium, we find that quantum fluctuations become massless and eventually unstable before the mean-field dynamical critical line, which suggests they could even alter qualitatively the mean-field scenario.
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.
Based on the obtained exact results we systematically study the quench dynamics of a one-dimensional spin-1/2 transverse field Ising model with zero- and finite-temperature initial states. We focus on the magnetization of the system after a sudden change of the external field and a coherent time-evolution process. With a zero-temperature initial state, the quench magnetic susceptibility as a function of the initial field strength exhibits strongly similar scaling behaviors to those of the static magnetic susceptibility, and the quench magnetic susceptibility as a function of the final field strength shows a discontinuity at the quantum critical point. This discontinuity remains robust and always occurs at the quantum critical point even for the case of finite-temperature initial systems, which indicates a great advantage of employing quench dynamics to study quantum phase transitions.