We investigate the relaxation dynamics of two distinct non-equilibrium processes: relaxation of three-dimensional antiferromagnetic lattice spin models with Heisenberg interaction following a critical quench, and a one-dimensional exclusion process inspired by the gear-like motion of molecular motors. In a system of three-dimensional Heisenberg antiferromagnets the non-conserved staggered magnetization components couple non-trivially to the conserved magnetization densities inducing fully reversible terms that enter the Langevin dynamic equation. We simulate the exact microscopic dynamics of such a system of antiferromagnets by employing a hybrid simulation algorithm that combines the reversible spin precession implemented by the fourth-order Runge-Kutta integration method with the standard relaxational dynamics at finite temperatures using Monte Carlo updates. We characterize the dynamic universality class of this system by probing the early temporal window where the system exhibits aging scaling properties. We also verify an earlier renormalization group prediction that the temporal decay exponent in the two-time spin autocorrelation function exhibits non-universality, specifically it depends on the width of the initial spin orientation distribution. We employ a similar numerical technique to study the critical dynamics of an anisotropic Heisenberg antiferromagnet in the presence of an external field. The phase diagram of this system exhibits two critical lines that meet at a bicritical point. We study the aging scaling dynamics for the model C critical line, probe the model F critical line by investigating the system size dependence of the characteristic spin-wave frequencies near criticality, and measure the dynamic critical exponents for the order parameter including its aging scaling at the bicritical point. We introduce a one-dimensional non-equilibrium lattice gas model representing the processive motion of dynein molecular motors over the microtubule. We study both dynamical and stationary state properties for the model consisting of hardcore particles hopping on the lattice with variable step sizes. We find that the stationary state gap-distribution exhibits striking peaks around gap sizes that are multiples of the maximum step size, for both open and periodic boundary conditions, and verify this using a mean-field calculation. For open boundary conditions, we observe intriguing damped oscillator-like distribution of particles over the lattice with a periodicity equal to the maximum step size. To characterize transient dynamics, we measure the mean square displacement that shows weak superdiffusive growth with exponent γ≈ 1.34 for periodic boundary and ballistic growth ( γ≈ 2) for open boundary conditions at early times. We also study the effect of Langmuir dynamics on the density profile.
We investigate the relaxation dynamics of two distinct non-equilibrium processes: relaxation of three-dimensional antiferromagnetic lattice spin models with Heisenberg interaction following a critical quench, and a one-dimensional exclusion process inspired by the gear-like motion of molecular motors. In a system of three-dimensional Heisenberg antiferromagnets the non-conserved staggered magnetization components couple non-trivially to the conserved magnetization densities inducing fully reversible terms that enter the Langevin dynamic equation. We simulate the exact microscopic dynamics of such a system of antiferromagnets by employing a hybrid simulation algorithm that combines the reversible spin precession implemented by the fourth-order Runge-Kutta integration method with the standard relaxational dynamics at finite temperatures using Monte Carlo updates. We characterize the dynamic universality class of this system by probing the early temporal window where the system exhibits aging scaling properties. We also verify an earlier renormalization group prediction that the temporal decay exponent in the two-time spin autocorrelation function exhibits non-universality, specifically it depends on the width of the initial spin orientation distribution. We employ a similar numerical technique to study the critical dynamics of an anisotropic Heisenberg antiferromagnet in the presence of an external field. The phase diagram of this system exhibits two critical lines that meet at a bicritical point. We study the aging scaling dynamics for the model C critical line, probe the model F critical line by investigating the system size dependence of the characteristic spin-wave frequencies near criticality, and measure the dynamic critical exponents for the order parameter including its aging scaling at the bicritical point. We introduce a one-dimensional non-equilibrium lattice gas model representing the processive motion of dynein molecular motors over the microtubule. We study both dynamical and stationary state properties for the model consisting of hardcore particles hopping on the lattice with variable step sizes. We find that the stationary state gap-distribution exhibits striking peaks around gap sizes that are multiples of the maximum step size, for both open and periodic boundary conditions, and verify this using a mean-field calculation. For open boundary conditions, we observe intriguing damped oscillator-like distribution of particles over the lattice with a periodicity equal to the maximum step size. To characterize transient dynamics, we measure the mean square displacement that shows weak superdiffusive growth with exponent γ≈ 1.34 for periodic boundary and ballistic growth ( γ≈ 2) for open boundary conditions at early times. We also study the effect of Langmuir dynamics on the density profile.
We numerically investigate the stationary and nonequilibrium critical dynamics in three-dimensional isotropic Heisenberg antiferromagnets. Since the nonconserved staggered magnetization couples dynamically to the conserved magnetization density, we employ a hybrid simulation algorithm that combines reversible spin precession with relaxational Kawasaki spin-exchange processes. We measure the dynamic critical exponent and identify a suitable intermediate time window to obtain the aging scaling exponents. Our results support an earlier renormalization-group prediction: While the critical aging collapse exponent assumes a universal value, the associated temporal decay exponent in the two-time spin autocorrelation function depends on the initial distribution of the conserved fields; here, specifically on the width of the initial spin orientation distribution.
We numerically investigate the nonequilibrium critical dynamics in three-dimensional anisotropic antiferromagnets in the presence of an external magnetic field. The phase diagram of this system exhibits two critical lines that meet at a bicritical point. The nonconserved components of the staggered magnetization order parameter couple dynamically to the conserved component of the magnetization density along the direction of the external field. Employing a hybrid computational algorithm that combines reversible spin precession with relaxational Monte Carlo updates, we study the aging scaling dynamics for the model C critical line, identifying the critical initial slip, autocorrelation, and aging exponents for both the order parameter and the conserved field, thus also verifying the dynamic critical exponent. We further probe the model F critical line by investigating the system size dependence of the characteristic spin wave frequencies near criticality and measure the dynamic critical exponents for the order parameter including its aging scaling at the bicritical point.
We numerically investigate the long-time behavior of the density-density auto-correlation function in driven lattice gases, with particle exclusion and periodic boundary conditions in one, two, and three dimensions using precise Monte Carlo simulations of larger system sizes than previous studies. In the one-dimensional asymmetric exclusion process on a ring with half the lattice sites occupied, we find that correlations induce extremely slow relaxation to the asymptotic power law decay We compare the crossover functions obtained from our simulations with various analytic results in the literature, and analyze the characteristic oscillations that occur in finite systems away from half-filling. As expected, correlations are weak in three dimensions and consequently the mean-field description is adequate. We also investigate the relaxation towards the non-equilibrium steady state in the two-time density-density auto-correlations, starting from strongly correlated initial conditions. We obtain simple aging scaling behavior in one, two, and three dimensions, with the expected power laws. We numerically investigate the behavior of driven lattice gases with nearest neighbor interactions at half-filling with periodic boundary conditions below and at the critical temperature using Monte Carlo simulations of very large lattices in two dimensions. This work is one of few that explores the relaxation to a non-equilibrium steady state. We obtain data collapse for the finite-size scaling form of density-density auto-correlation function at the critical point. We achieve data collapse using finite-size scaling of the time-dependent order parameter during the transient regime starting from strongly correlated initial conditions. We present simple aging scaling of the density-density auto-correlation function at the critical point starting from strongly correlated initial conditions using Monte Carlo simulations of two different lattice anisotropies. We thus unambiguously confirm the critical exponents determined by renormalization group methods using measurement of dynamic quantities in the transient regime. Measuring these dynamic quantities in the transient regime provides more conclusive measurements of the critical exponents than previous studies measuring static quantities in the stationary state. We provide qualitative arguments that the lattice anisotropy determines the steady-state for sub-critical quenches.
Among the many non-equilibrium processes encountered in nature we deal with two different but related aspects. One is the non-equilibrium relaxation process that is at the origin of \'aging phenomena••, and the other one is a non-equilibrium phase transition, called ••dynamic phase transition••. One of the main purposes of our research is to explore more realistic situations than studied previously. Indeed, in the study of aging phenomena certain kinds of disorder effects are considered, and we introduce the ••surface•• as a spatial boundary to the system undergoing the dynamic phase transition. In order to observe these processes as clearly as possible, we study in both cases simple spin systems. Using Monte Carlo simulations we first investigate aging in three-dimensional Ising spin glasses as well as in two-dimensional Ising models with disorder quenched to low temperatures. The time-dependent dynamical correlation length L(t) is determined numerically and the scaling behavior of various two-time quantities as a function of L(t)/L(s) is discussed where t and s are two different times. For disordered Ising models deviations of L(t) from algebraic growth law show up. The generalized scaling forms as a function of L(t)/L(s) reveal a generic simple aging scenario for Ising spin glasses as well as for disordered Ising ferromagnets. We also study the local critical phenomena at a dynamic phase transition by means of numerical simulations of kinetic Ising models with surfaces subjected to a periodic oscillating field. We examine layer-dependent quantities, such as the period-averaged magnetization per layer Q(z) and the layer susceptibility ¥ö(z), and determine local critical exponents through finite size scaling. Both for two and three dimensions, we find that the values of the surface exponents differ from those of the equilibrium critical surface. It is revealed that the surface phase diagram of the non-equilibrium system is not identical to that of the equilibrium system in three dimensions.
The theory of statistical mechanics provides a powerful conceptual framework within which the relevant (macroscopic) features of systems at equilibrium can be described. As there is currently no equivalent capable of encompassing the much richer class of non-equilibrium phenomena, research in this direction proceeds mainly on an instance-by-instance basis. The aim of this Thesis is to describe in some detail three such attempts, which involve different dynamical aspects of classical and quantum systems. As summarised below, each of the last three Chapters of this document delves into one of these different topics, while Chapter 2 provides a brief introduction on the study of non-equilibrium dynamics. In Chapter 3 we investigate the purely relaxational dynamics of classical critical ferromagnetic systems in the proximity of surfaces, paying particular attention to the effects that the latter induce on the early stages of the evolution following an abrupt change in the temperature of the sample. When the latter ends close enough to the critical value which separates the paramagnetic from the ferromagnetic phase, it effectively introduces a temporal boundary which can be treated as if it were a surface. Within this picture, we highlight the emergence of novel effects near the effective edge formed by the intersection of the two spatial and temporal boundaries. Our findings are apparently in disagreement with previous predictions which were based on the assumption that the presence of such an edge would not affect the scaling behaviour of observables; in order to explain this discrepancy, we propose an alternative for the original power-counting argument which, at least, correctly predicts the emergence of novel field-theoretical divergences in our one-loop calculations. We show that said singularities are associated with the scaling at the edge. Moreover, by encoding our findings in a boundary renormalisation group framework, we argue that the new predicted behaviour represents a universal feature associated to the short-distance expansion of the order parameter of the transition near the edge; we also calculate explicitly its anomalous dimension at the first-order in a dimensional expansion. As a qualitative feature, this anomalous dimension depends on the type of phase transition occurring at the surface. We exploit this fact in order to provide numerical support to our predictions via Monte Carlo simulations of the dynamical behaviour of a three-dimensional Ising model. The main results reported in Chap. 3 have appeared in Ref. [1]. In Chapter 4 we revisit the Euclidean mapping to imaginary times which has been recently proposed [2, 3] as an alternative for approaching the problem of quantum dynamics following a quench. This is expected to allow one to reformulate the original problem as a static one confined in a film geometry. We show that this interpretation actually holds only if the initial state of the dynamics is pure. Statistical mixtures, instead, intertwine the effects due to the two boundaries, which therefore cannot be regarded as being independent. We emphasize that, although the aforementioned reinterpretation as a confined static problem fails, one is still able, in principle, to write down and solve the corresponding equations. We also discuss in some detail the relation between this approach and the real-time field-theoretical one which makes use of the two-time Keldysh contour. For this purpose, we study the analytical structure of relevant observables — such as correlation functions — in the complex plane of times, identifying a subdivision of this domain into several sectors which depend on the ordering of the imaginary parts of the involved time coordinates. Within each of these subdomains, the analytic continuation to the real axis provides in principle a different result. This feature allows one to reconstruct from the Euclidean formalism all possible non-time-ordered functions, which in particular include all those which can be calculated via the Keldysh two-time formalism. Moreover, we give a prescription on how to retrieve response functions, discussing some simple examples and rationalising some recent numerical data obtained for one of these observables in a one-dimensional quantum Ising chain [4]. We also highlight the emergence of a light-cone effect fairly similar to the one previously found for correlation functions [2], which therefore provides further confirmation to the fact that information travels across the system in the form of the entanglement of quasi-particles produced by the quenching procedure. We have reported part of this analysis in Ref. [5]. Chapter 5 presents part of our recent work on effective relaxation in quantum systems following a quench and on the observed prethermalisation. We analyse the effects caused by the introduction of a long-range integrability-breaking interaction in the early stages of the dynamics of an otherwise integrable quantum spin chain following a quench in the magnetic field. By employing a suitable transformation, we redefine the theory in terms of a fully-connected model of hard-core bosons, which allows us to exploit the (generically) low density of excitations for rendering our model exactly solvable (in a numerical sense, i.e., by numerically diagonalising an exact matrix). We verify that, indeed, as long as the parameters of the quench are not too close to the critical point, the low-density approximation captures the dynamical features of the elementary operators, highlighting the appearance of marked plateaux in their dynamics, which we reinterpret as the emergence of a prethermal regime in the original model. As expected, the latter behaviour is reflected also on extensive observables which can be constructed as appropriate combinations of the mode populations. For these quantities, the typical approach to the quasi-stationary value is algebraic with exponent a ≈ 3, independently of the size of the system, the strength of the interaction and the amplitude of the magnetic field (as long as it is kept far from the critical point). The plateaux mentioned above last until a recurrence time — which can be approximately identified with tR ≈ N/2 for single modes and t′R ≈ N/4 for extensive quantities — after which quantum oscillations due to the finite size of the chain reappear. Our procedure allows us to shed some light over prethermal features without having to considerably limit the size of the system, which we can choose to be quite large, as we discuss in Ref. [6].
We now begin our exposition of universal dynamic scaling behavior that emerges under non-equilibrium conditions. We are mainly concerned with the relaxational models A and B here, but also touch on other dynamic universality classes. First, we consider non-equilibrium critical relaxation from a disordered initial state, and compute the associated universal scaling exponents within the dynamic renormalization group framework. Related phenomena in the early-time regime, prior to reaching temporally translationally invariant asymptotics, are ‘aging’ and a non-equilibrium fluctuation-dissipation ratio, both of which have enjoyed prominence in the literature on ‘glassy’ kinetics. In this context, we derive the critical initial slip exponent for the order parameter, and briefly discuss interesting persistence properties. Second, we explore the long-time scaling laws in phase ordering kinetics and coarsening for the relaxational models, following a fast temperature ‘quench’ into the ordered phase, in systems with either non-conserved or conserved order parameters. Aside from a few explicit computations in the spherical model limit (wherein the number of order parameter components n → ∞), we largely employ phenomenological considerations and scaling theory, stressing the importance of topological defects for energy dissipation during coarsening. Next we address the question how violations of Einstein's relation that links relaxation coefficients and noise correlations might affect the asymptotic dynamic critical scaling behavior. Whereas in systems with non-conserved order parameter typically the equilibrium scaling laws are recovered in the vicinity of the critical point, in contrast genuinely novel universality classes may emerge in the case of a conserved parameter, provided it is driven out of equilibrium in a spatially anisotropic fashion.