Abstract We generalize the numerical linked-cluster expansion (NLCE) method to study the dissipative quantum many-body system. We apply the NLCE to the triangular strip and two-dimensional lattice system. We investigate the dynamics and steady-state properties of the dissipative XYZ model where the coherent dynamics is governed by the anisotropic Heisenberg Hamiltonian while the nonunitary process is induced by the incoherent spin flips. By comparing with the quantum trajectory simulations, the NLCE results show good performance in capturing the dynamics of system with short-range correlations. For strong and long-range correlated system, the larger size clusters in the series should be included. The NLCE study for the magnetic susceptibility also signals the steady-state paramagnetic-ferromagnetic phase transition in the two-dimensional case.
Abstract We generalize the numerical linked-cluster expansion (NLCE) method to study the dissipative quantum many-body system. We apply the NLCE to the triangular strip and two-dimensional lattice system. We investigate the dynamics and steady-state properties of the dissipative XYZ model where the coherent dynamics is governed by the anisotropic Heisenberg Hamiltonian while the nonunitary process is induced by the incoherent spin flips. By comparing with the quantum trajectory simulations, the NLCE results show good performance in capturing the dynamics of system with short-range correlations. For strong and long-range correlated system, the larger size clusters in the series should be included. The NLCE study for the magnetic susceptibility also signals the steady-state paramagnetic-ferromagnetic phase transition in the two-dimensional case.
We use numerical linked cluster expansions (NLCEs) to study correlated lattice systems in one and two dimensions.For fermions in the honeycomb lattice, we study its finite-temperature properties and short-range spin correlations using NLCEs and determinantal quantum Monte Carlo (DQMC) simulations.For the homogeneous system, we analyze a number of thermodynamic quantities, including the entropy, the specific heat, uniform and staggered spin susceptibilities, short-range spin correlations, and the double occupancy at and away from half filling.Employing a local density approximation (LDA), we examine the viability of adiabatic cooling by increasing the interaction strength for homogeneous as well as for trapped systems.We also use NLCEs to study thermodynamic properties of the two-dimensional spin-1/2 Ising, XY, and Heisenberg models with bimodal random-bond disorder on the square and honeycomb lattices.In all cases, the nearest-neighbor coupling between the spins takes values ±J with equal probability.We obtain the disorder averaged (over all disorder configurations) energy, entropy, specific heat, and uniform magnetic susceptibility in each case.These results are compared with the corresponding ones in the clean models.Analytic expressions are obtained for low orders in the expansion of these thermodynamic quantities in inverse temperature.For many-body localization in disordered isolated systems, we study quantum quenches in the thermodynamic limit.By a quantum quench it is meant that the initial state is stationary with respect iii to an initial Hamiltonian, which is suddenly changed to a new (time-independent) Hamiltonian.The latter then drives the (unitary) dynamics of the system.We are interested in the time average of observables after relaxation following the quench, which can be computed under the so-called diagonal ensemble.
We propose a generalization of the linked-cluster expansions to study driven-dissipative quantum lattice models, directly accessing the thermodynamic limit of the system. Our method leads to the evaluation of the desired extensive property onto small connected clusters of a given size and topology. We first test this approach on the isotropic spin-1/2 Hamiltonian in two dimensions, where each spin is coupled to an independent environment that induces incoherent spin flips. Then we apply it to the study of an anisotropic model displaying a dissipative phase transition from a magnetically ordered to a disordered phase. By means of a Pad\'e analysis on the series expansions for the average magnetization, we provide a viable route to locate the phase transition and to extrapolate the critical exponent for the magnetic susceptibility.
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.
We develop a numerical linked cluster expansion (NLCE) method that can be applied directly to inhomogeneous systems, for example, Hamiltonians with disorder and dynamics initiated from inhomogeneous initial states. We demonstrate the method by calculating dynamics for single-spin expectations and spin correlations in two-dimensional spin models on a square lattice, starting from a checkerboard state. We show that NLCE can give moderate to dramatic improvement over an exact diagonalization of comparable computational cost and that the advantage in computational resources grows exponentially as the size of the clusters included grows. Although the method applies to any type of NLCE, our explicit benchmarks use the rectangle expansion. Besides showing the capability to treat inhomogeneous systems, these benchmarks demonstrate the rectangle expansion's utility out of equilibrium.
We demonstrate that numerical linked cluster expansions (NLCE) yield a powerful approach to calculate time-dependent correlation functions for quantum many-body systems in one dimension. As a paradigmatic example, we study the dynamics of the spin current in the spin-1/2XXZ chain for different values of anisotropy, as well as in the presence of an integrability-breaking next-nearest neighbor interaction. For short to intermediate time scales, we unveil that NLCE yields a convergence towards the thermodynamic limit already for small cluster sizes, which is much faster than in direct calculations of the autocorrelation function for systems with open or periodic boundary conditions. Most importantly, we show that the range of accessible cluster sizes in NLCE can be extended by evaluating the contributions of larger clusters by means of a pure-state approach based on the concept of dynamical quantum typicality (DQT). Even for moderate computational effort, this combination of DQT and NLCE provides a competitive alternative to existing state-of-the-art techniques, which may be applied in higher dimensions as well.
We study dynamical properties of dissipative XYZ Heisenberg lattices where anisotropic spin-spin coupling competes with local incoherent spin flip processes. In particular, we explore a region of the parameter space where dissipative magnetic phase transitions for the steady state have been recently predicted by mean-field theories and exact numerical methods. We investigate the asymptotic decay rate towards the steady state both in 1D (up to the thermodynamical limit) and in finite-size 2D lattices, showing that critical dynamics does not occur in 1D, but it can emerge in 2D. We also analyze the behavior of individual homodyne quantum trajectories, which reveal the nature of the transition.