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Authors
John Cardy
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After a brief introduction to the concept of entanglement in quantum systems, I apply these ideas to many-body systems and show that the von Neumann entropy is an effective way of characterising the entanglement between the degrees of freedom in different regions of space. Close to a quantum phase transition it has universal features which serve as a diagnostic of such phenomena. In the second part I consider the unitary time evolution of such systems following a `quantum quench in which a parameter in the hamiltonian is suddenly changed, and argue that finite regions should effectively thermalise at late times, after interesting transient effects.
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Bridging the second law of thermodynamics and microscopic reversible dynamics has been a longstanding problem in statistical physics. We here address this problem on the basis of quantum many-body physics, and discuss how the entropy production saturates in isolated quantum systems under unitary dynamics. First, we rigorously prove the saturation of the entropy production in the long time regime, where a total system can be in a pure state. Second, we discuss the non-negativity of the entropy production at saturation, implying the second law of thermodynamics. This is based on the eigenstate thermalization hypothesis (ETH), which states that even a single energy eigenstate is thermal. We also numerically demonstrate that the entropy production saturates at a non-negative value even when the initial state of a heat bath is a single energy eigenstate. Our results reveal fundamental properties of the entropy production in isolated quantum systems at late times.
We study in general the time-evolution of correlation functions in a extended quantum system after the quench of a parameter in the hamiltonian. We show that correlation functions in d dimensions can be extracted using methods of boundary critical phenomena in d+1 dimensions. For d=1 this allows to use the powerful tools of conformal field theory in the case of critical evolution. Several results are obtained in generic dimension in the gaussian (mean-field) approximation. These predictions are checked against the real-time evolution of some solvable models that allows also to understand which features are valid beyond the critical evolution. All our findings may be explained in terms of a picture generally valid, whereby quasiparticles, entangled over regions of the order of the correlation length in the initial state, then propagate with a finite speed through the system. Furthermore we show that the long-time results can be interpreted in terms of a generalized Gibbs ensemble. We discuss some open questions and possible future developments.
We formulate a new ``Wigner characteristics based method to calculate entanglement entropies of subsystems of Fermions using Keldysh field theory. This bypasses the requirements of working with complicated manifolds for calculating R{e}nyi entropies for many body systems. We provide an exact analytic formula for R{e}nyi and von-Neumann entanglement entropies of non-interacting open quantum systems, which are initialised in arbitrary Fock states. We use this formalism to look at entanglement entropies of momentum Fock states of one-dimensional Fermions. We show that the entanglement entropy of a Fock state can scale either logarithmically or linearly with subsystem size, depending on whether the number of discontinuities in the momentum distribution is smaller or larger than the subsystem size. This classification of states in terms number of blocks of occupied momenta allows us to analytically estimate the number of critical and non-critical Fock states for a particular subsystem size. We also use this formalism to describe entanglement dynamics of an open quantum system starting with a single domain wall at the center of the system. Using entanglement entropy and mutual information, we understand the dynamics in terms of coherent motion of the domain wall wavefronts, creation and annihilation of domain walls and incoherent exchange of particles with the bath.
We analyze the thermalization properties and the validity of the Eigenstate Thermalization Hypothesis in a generic class of quantum Hamiltonians where the quench parameter explicitly breaks a Z_2 symmetry. Natural realizations of such systems are given by random matrices expressed in a block form where the terms responsible for the quench dynamics are the off-diagonal blocks. Our analysis examines both dense and sparse random matrix realizations of the Hamiltonians and the observables. Sparse random matrices may be associated with local quantum Hamiltonians and they show a different spread of the observables on the energy eigenstates with respect to the dense ones. In particular, the numerical data seems to support the existence of rare states, i.e. states where the observables take expectation values which are different compared to the typical ones sampled by the micro-canonical distribution. In the case of sparse random matrices we also extract the finite size behavior of two different time scales associated with the thermalization process.
We analyze the quantum trajectory dynamics of free fermions subject to continuous monitoring. For weak monitoring, we identify a novel dynamical regime of subextensive entanglement growth, reminiscent of a critical phase with an emergent conformal invariance. For strong monitoring, however, the dynamics favors a transition into a quantum Zeno-like area-law regime. Close to the critical point, we observe logarithmic finite size corrections, indicating a Berezinskii-Kosterlitz-Thouless mechanism underlying the transition. This uncovers an unconventional entanglement transition in an elementary, physically realistic model for weak continuous measurements. In addition, we demonstrate that the measurement aspect in the dynamics is crucial for whether or not a phase transition takes place.
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