We introduce a Hamiltonian dynamics for the description of long-range interacting systems in contact with a thermal bath (i.e., in the canonical ensemble). The dynamics confirms statistical mechanics equilibrium predictions for the Hamiltonian Mean Field model and the equilibrium ensemble equivalence. We find that long-lasting quasi-stationary states persist in presence of the interaction with the environment. Our results indicate that quasi-stationary states are indeed reproducible in real physical experiments.
We introduce a Hamiltonian dynamics for the description of long-range interacting systems in contact with a thermal bath (i.e., in the canonical ensemble). The dynamics confirms statistical mechanics equilibrium predictions for the Hamiltonian Mean Field model and the equilibrium ensemble equivalence. We find that long-lasting quasi-stationary states persist in presence of the interaction with the environment. Our results indicate that quasi-stationary states are indeed reproducible in real physical experiments.
In this Thesis we describe the theoretical-computational study performed on the behavior of isolated systems, far from thermodynamic equilibrium. Analyzing models well-known in literature we follow a path bringing to the classification of different behaviors in function of the interaction range of the systems' particles. In the case of systems with long-range interaction we studied the "Quasi-Stationary states" (QSSs) which emerge at short times when the system evolves with Hamiltonian dynamics. Their interest is in the fact that in many physical systems, such as self-gravitating systems, plasmas and systems characterized by wave-particle interaction, QSSs are the only experimentally accessible regime. QSS are defined as stable solutions of the Vlasov equation and, as their duration diverges with the system size, for large systems' size they can be seen as the true equilibria. They do not follow the Boltzmann statistics, and it does not exists a general theory which describes them. Anyway it is possible to give an approximate description using Lynden-Bell theory. One part of the thesis is devoted to shed light on the characteristics of the phase diagram of the "Hamiltonian mean field" model (HMF), during the QSS, calculated with the Lynden-Bell theory. The results of our work allowed to confirm numerically the presence of a phase re-entrance. In the Thesis is present also a detailed description on the system's caloric curves and on the metastability. Still in this context we show an analysis of the equivalence of the statistical ensembles, confirmed in almost the totality of the phase diagram (except for a small region), although the presence of negative specific heat in the microcanonical ensemble, which in Boltzmannian systems implies the non-equivalence of statistical ensembles. This result allowed us to arrive to a surprising conclusion: the presence of negative specific heat in the canonical ensemble. Still in the context of long-range interacting systems we analyze the linear stability of the non-homogeneous QSSs with respect to the Vlasov equation. Since the study of QSS find an application in the Free-electron laser (FEL) and other light sources, which are characterized by wave-particle interaction, we analyze, in the last chapter, the experimental perspectives of our work in this context. The other class of systems we studied are short-range interacting systems. Here the behavior of the components of the system is strongly influenced by the neighbors, and if one takes a system in a disordered state (a zero magnetization state for magnetic systems), which relaxes towards an ordered equilibrium state, one sees that the ordering process first develops locally and then extends to the whole system forming domains of opposed magnetization which grow in size. This process is called "coarsening". Our work in this field consisted in investigating numerically the laws of scale, and in the Thesis we characterize the temporal dependence of the domain sizes for different interaction ranges and we show a comparison between Hamiltonian and Langevin dynamics. This work inserts in the open debate on the equivalence of different dynamics where we found that, at least for times not too large, the two dynamics give different scaling laws.
Long-range interacting Hamiltonian systems are believed to relax generically towards non-equilibrium states called "quasi-stationary" because they evolve towards thermodynamic equilibrium very slowly, on a time-scale diverging with particle number. We show here that, by applying a suitable perturbation operator for a finite time interval, we obtain, in a family of long-range systems, non-equilibrium states which appear to be strictly stationary. They exist even in the case of a harmonic potential, and are characterised by an ordered microscopic phase space structure. We give some simple heuristic arguments which predict reasonably well some properties of these states.
Although statistical mechanics describes thermal equilibrium states, these states may or may not emerge dynamically for a subsystem of an isolated quantum many-body system. For instance, quantum systems that are near-integrable usually fail to thermalize in an experimentally realistic time scale, and instead relax to quasi-stationary prethermal states that can be described by statistical mechanics, when approximately conserved quantities are included in a generalized Gibbs ensemble (GGE). We experimentally study the relaxation dynamics of a chain of up to 22 spins evolving under a long-range transverse-field Ising Hamiltonian following a sudden quench. For sufficiently long-range interactions, the system relaxes to a new type of prethermal state that retains a strong memory of the initial conditions. However, the prethermal state in this case cannot be described by a standard GGE; it rather arises from an emergent double-well potential felt by the spin excitations. This result shows that prethermalization occurs in a broader context than previously thought, and reveals new challenges for a generic understanding of the thermalization of quantum systems, particularly in the presence of long-range interactions.
In this paper, we address the possibility of generalising the standard analysis of thermal contact between a sample system and a heat bath, by including long range interactions between them. As a concrete example, both system and bath are treated within the long range Ising model. For this model, we derive the equilibrium probability distribution of the energy of the sample system. Equilibrium properties of the system magnetisation and stability of the solutions is discussed. We find existence of a metastable phase below a critical temperature of the bath.
Long-lived quasi-stationary states (QSSs) are a signature characteristic of long-range interacting systems both in the classical and in the quantum realms. Often, they emerge after a sudden quench of the Hamiltonian internal parameters and present a macroscopic lifetime, which increases with the system size. Despite their ubiquity, the fundamental mechanism at their root remains unknown. Here, we show that the spectrum of systems with power-law decaying couplings remains discrete up to the thermodynamic limit. As a consequence, several traditional results on the chaotic nature of the spectrum in many-body quantum systems are not satisfied in the presence of long-range interactions. In particular, the existence of QSSs may be traced back to the finiteness of Poincaré recurrence times. This picture justifies and extends known results on the anomalous magnetization dynamics in the quantum Ising model with power-law decaying couplings. The comparison between the discrete spectrum of long-range systems and more conventional examples of pure point spectra in the disordered case is also discussed.
Experimental progress in atomic, molecular, and optical platforms in the last decade has stimulated strong and broad interest in the quantum coherent dynamics of many long-range interacting particles. The prominent collective character of these systems enables novel non-equilibrium phenomena with no counterpart in conventional quantum systems with local interactions. Much of the theory work in this area either focussed on the impact of variable-range interaction tails on the physics of local interactions or relied on mean-field-like descriptions based on the opposite limit of all-to-all infinite-range interactions. In this Report, we present a systematic and organic review of recent advances in the field. Working with prototypical interacting quantum spin lattices without disorder, our presentation hinges upon a versatile theoretical formalism that interpolates between the few-body mean-field physics and the many-body physics of quasi-local interactions. Such a formalism allows us to connect these two regimes, providing both a formal quantitative tool and basic physical intuition. We leverage this unifying framework to review several findings of the last decade, including the peculiar non-ballistic spreading of quantum correlations, counter-intuitive slowdown of entanglement dynamics, suppression of thermalization and equilibration, anomalous scaling of defects upon traversing criticality, dynamical phase transitions, and genuinely non-equilibrium phases stabilized by periodic driving. The style of this Report is on the pedagogical side, which makes it accessible to readers without previous experience in the subject matter.