The study of the non-equilibrium dynamics of many-body systems after a quantum quench received a considerable boost and a deep theoretical understanding from the path integral formulation in imaginary time. However, the celebrated problem of a quench in the Luttinger parameter of a one dimensional quantum critical system (massless quench) has so far only been solved in the real-time Heisenberg picture. In order to bridge this theoretical gap and to understand on the same ground massive and massless quenches, we study the problem of a gaussian field characterized by a coupling parameter K within a strip and a different one K0 in the remaining two semi-infinite planes. We give a fully analytical solution using the electrostatic analogy with the problem of a dielectric material within a strip surrounded by an infinite medium of different dielectric constant, and exploiting the method of charge images. After analytic continuation, this solution allows us to obtain all the correlation functions after the quench within a path integral approach in imaginary time, thus recovering and generalizing the results in real time. Furthermore, this imaginary-time approach establishes a remarkable connection between the quench and the famous problem of the conductivity of a Tomonaga-Luttinger liquid coupled to two semi-infinite leads: the two are in fact related by a rotation of the spacetime coordinates.
The study of the non-equilibrium dynamics of many-body systems after a quantum quench received a considerable boost and a deep theoretical understanding from the path integral formulation in imaginary time. However, the celebrated problem of a quench in the Luttinger parameter of a one dimensional quantum critical system (massless quench) has so far only been solved in the real-time Heisenberg picture. In order to bridge this theoretical gap and to understand on the same ground massive and massless quenches, we study the problem of a gaussian field characterized by a coupling parameter K within a strip and a different one K0 in the remaining two semi-infinite planes. We give a fully analytical solution using the electrostatic analogy with the problem of a dielectric material within a strip surrounded by an infinite medium of different dielectric constant, and exploiting the method of charge images. After analytic continuation, this solution allows us to obtain all the correlation functions after the quench within a path integral approach in imaginary time, thus recovering and generalizing the results in real time. Furthermore, this imaginary-time approach establishes a remarkable connection between the quench and the famous problem of the conductivity of a Tomonaga-Luttinger liquid coupled to two semi-infinite leads: the two are in fact related by a rotation of the spacetime coordinates.
The study of non-equilibrium dynamics of many-body systems after a quantum quench received a considerable boost and a deep theoretical understanding from the path integral formulation in imaginary time. However, the celebrated problem of a quench in the Luttinger parameter of a one dimensional quantum critical system (massless quench) has so far only been solved in the real-time Heisenberg picture. In order to bridge this theoretical gap and to understand on the same ground massive and massless quenches, we study the problem of a gaussian field characterized by a coupling parameter K K within a strip and a different one K_0 K 0 in the remaining two semi-infinite planes. We give a fully analytical solution using the electrostatic analogy with the problem of a dielectric material within a strip surrounded by an infinite medium of different dielectric constant, and exploiting the method of charge images. After analytic continuation, this solution allows us to obtain all the correlation functions after the quench within a path integral approach in imaginary time, thus recovering and generalizing the results in real time. Furthermore, this imaginary-time approach establishes a remarkable connection between the quench and the famous problem of the conductivity of a Tomonaga-Luttinger liquid coupled to two semi-infinite leads: the two are in fact related by a rotation of the spacetime coordinates.
We study the quantum quench in two coupled Tomonaga-Luttinger Liquids (TLLs), from the off-critical to the critical regime, relying on the conformal field theory approach and the known solutions for single TLLs. We consider a squeezed form of the initial state, whose low energy limit is fixed in a way to describe a massive and a massless mode, and we encode the non-equilibrium dynamics in a proper rescaling of the time. In this way, we compute several correlation functions, which at leading order factorize into multipoint functions evaluated at different times for the two modes. Depending on the observable, the contribution from the massive or from the massless mode can be the dominant one, giving rise to exponential or power-law decay in time, respectively. Our results find a direct application in all the quench problems where, in the scaling limit, there are two independent massless fields: these include the Hubbard model, the Gaudin-Yang gas, and tunnel-coupled tubes in cold atoms experiments.
It is common in physics to treat 1D system as a toy model in order to test a physical theory because it is easier to work with low dimensional systems and find analytical solutions. One naively will say that one-dimensional models serve as toy models and they do not apply in the real world. But, one-dimensional systems, e.g quantum wires, exists in nature and have quite different physics from higher dimensional systems. It is remarkable that, in 1D, an interacting fermionic problem can be turned to a free bosonic theory. An interesting question to ask is how the system evolves after a change in the systems internal parameters. This is called a quantum quench. In this thesis we investigate quantum quenches in the Luttinger liquid model, which is a 1D model and serves as the analog of the Fermi liquid theory in one dimension. More specifically, we study the kinetic energy, when we periodically drive the internal parameters of the system, and the two point correlation function, after a periodic quench of finite duration.
We study the relaxation dynamics of the one-dimensional Tomonaga–Luttinger model after an interaction quench, paying particular attention to the momentum dependence of the two-particle interaction. Several potentials of different analytical forms are investigated that all lead to universal Luttinger liquid (LL) physics in equilibrium. The steady-state fermionic momentum distribution shows universal behavior in the sense of the LL phenomenology. For generic regular potentials, the large time decay of the momentum distribution function toward the steady-state value is characterized by a power law with a universal exponent that depends only on the potential at zero momentum transfer. The commonly employed ad hoc procedure fails to give this exponent. In addition to quenches from zero to positive interactions, we also consider the abrupt changes in the interaction between two arbitrary values. Additionally, we discuss the appearance of a factor of two between the steady-state momentum distribution function and that obtained in equilibrium at equal two-particle interaction.
We study the relaxation dynamics of the one-dimensional Tomonaga–Luttinger model after an interaction quench, paying particular attention to the momentum dependence of the two-particle interaction. Several potentials of different analytical forms are investigated that all lead to universal Luttinger liquid (LL) physics in equilibrium. The steady-state fermionic momentum distribution shows universal behavior in the sense of the LL phenomenology. For generic regular potentials, the large time decay of the momentum distribution function toward the steady-state value is characterized by a power law with a universal exponent that depends only on the potential at zero momentum transfer. The commonly employed ad hoc procedure fails to give this exponent. In addition to quenches from zero to positive interactions, we also consider the abrupt changes in the interaction between two arbitrary values. Additionally, we discuss the appearance of a factor of two between the steady-state momentum distribution function and that obtained in equilibrium at equal two-particle interaction.
In this work, we study the non-equilibrium dynamics of low-dimensional strongly correlated quantum systems, which in our case are generated by sudden and time-dependent quantum quenches. Such non-equilibrium dynamics are a particularly difficult problem, because the time evolution of the initial many-body quantum state, which is governed by the post-quench Hamiltonian, is highly non-trivial. On top of that, applying an operator to this many-body quantum state in order to calculate its expectation values, typically creates an intricate set of excitations. Throughout the thesis, we furthermore contrast the results that we have obtained using exact numerical methods for two microscopic models, namely the Heisenberg and Fermi-Hubbard chains, with results derived from the Luttinger liquid theory, which, in equilibrium, describes the universal behavior of the two models.In the second part of the thesis, we reduce the dimensionality even further and employ complementary numerical and analytical tools to examine the unusual non-equilibrium behavior of a ring-shaped quantum impurity hosting interacting spin-less fermions.