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We show that the dynamics resulting from preparing a one-dimensional quantum system in the ground state of two decoupled parts, then joined together and left to evolve unitarily with a translational invariant Hamiltonian (a local quench), can be described by means of quantum field theory. In the case when the corresponding theory is conformal, we study the evolution of the entanglement entropy for different bi-partitions of the line. We also consider the behavior of one- and two-point correlation functions. All our findings may be explained in terms of a picture, that we believe to be valid more generally, whereby quasiparticles emitted from the joining point at the initial time propagate semiclassically through the system.
Quantum entanglement and its main quantitative measures, the entanglement entropy and entanglement negativity, play a central role in many body physics. An interesting twist arises when the system considered has symmetries leading to conserved quantities: Recent studies introduced a way to define, represent in field theory, calculate for 1+1D conformal systems, and measure, the contribution of individual charge sectors to the entanglement measures between different parts of a system in its ground state. In this paper, we apply these ideas to the time evolution of the charge-resolved contributions to the entanglement entropy and negativity after a local quantum quench. We employ conformal field theory techniques and find that the known dependence of the total entanglement on time after a quench, $S_A sim log(t)$, results from $simsqrt{log(t)}$ significant charge sectors, each of which contributes $simsqrt{log(t)}$ to the entropy. We compare our calculation to numerical results obtained by the time-dependent density matrix renormalization group algorithm and exact solution in the noninteracting limit, finding good agreement between all these methods.
One of the manifestations of relativistic invariance in non-equilibrium quantum field theory is the horizon effect a.k.a. light-cone spreading of correlations: starting from an initially short-range correlated state, measurements of two observers at distant space-time points are expected to remain independent until their past light-cones overlap. Surprisingly, we find that in the presence of topological excitations correlations can develop outside of horizon and indeed even between infinitely distant points. We demonstrate this effect for a wide class of global quantum quenches to the sine-Gordon model. We point out that besides the maximum velocity bound implied by relativistic invariance, clustering of initial correlations is required to establish the horizon effect. We show that quenches in the sine-Gordon model have an interesting property: despite the fact that the initial states have exponentially decaying correlations and cluster in terms of the bosonic fields, they violate the clustering condition for the soliton fields, which is argued to be related to the non-trivial field topology. The nonlinear dynamics governed by the solitons makes the clustering violation manifest also in correlations of the local bosonic fields after the quench.
We consider a quantum quench in a finite system of length $L$ described by a 1+1-dimensional CFT, of central charge $c$, from a state with finite energy density corresponding to an inverse temperature $betall L$. For times $t$ such that $ell/2<t<(L-ell)/2$ the reduced density matrix of a subsystem of length $ell$ is exponentially close to a thermal density matrix. We compute exactly the overlap $cal F$ of the state at time $t$ with the initial state and show that in general it is exponentially suppressed at large $L/beta$. However, for minimal models with $c<1$ (more generally, rational CFTs), at times which are integer multiples of $L/2$ (for periodic boundary conditions, $L$ for open boundary conditions) there are (in general, partial) revivals at which $cal F$ is $O(1)$, leading to an eventual complete revival with ${cal F}=1$. There is also interesting structure at all rational values of $t/L$, related to properties of the CFT under modular transformations. At early times $t!ll!(Lbeta)^{1/2}$ there is a universal decay ${cal F}simexpbig(!-!(pi c/3)Lt^2/beta(beta^2+4t^2)big)$. The effect of an irrelevant non-integrable perturbation of the CFT is to progressively broaden each revival at $t=nL/2$ by an amount $O(n^{1/2})$.
We derive the dominant contribution to the large-distance decay of correlation functions for a spin chain model that exhibits both Haldane and Neel phases in its ground state phase diagram. The analytic results are obtained by means of an approximate mapping between a spin-1 anisotropic Hamiltonian onto a fermionic model of noninteracting Bogolioubov quasiparticles related in turn to the XY spin-1/2 chain in a transverse field. This approach allows us to express the spin-1 string operators in terms of fermionic operators so that the dominant contribution to the string correlators at large distances can be computed using the technique of Toeplitz determinants. As expected, we find long-range string order both in the longitudinal and in the transverse channel in the Haldane phase, while in the Neel phase only the longitudinal order survives. In this way, the long-range string order can be explicitly related to the components of the magnetization of the XY model. Moreover, apart from the critical line, where the decay is algebraic, we find that in the gapped phases the decay is governed by an exponential tail multiplied by algebraic factors. As regards the usual two points correlation functions, we show that the longitudinal one behaves in a dual fashion with respect to the transverse string correlator, namely both the asymptotic values and the decay laws exchange when the transition line is crossed. For the transverse spin-spin correlator, we find a finite characteristic length which is an unexpected feature at the critical point. We also comment briefly the entanglement features of the original system versus those of the effective model. The goodness of the approximation and the analytical predictions are checked versus density-matrix renormalization group calculations.
Classification of the non-equilibrium quantum many-body dynamics is a challenging problem in condensed matter physics and statistical mechanics. In this work, we study the basic question that whether a (1+1) dimensional conformal field theory (CFT) is stable or not under a periodic driving with $N$ non-commuting Hamiltonians. Previous works showed that a Floquet (or periodically driven) CFT driven by certain $SL_2$ deformed Hamiltonians exhibit both non-heating (stable) and heating (unstable) phases. In this work, we show that the phase diagram depends on the types of driving Hamiltonians. In general, the heating phase is generic, but the non-heating phase may be absent in the phase diagram. For the existence of the non-heating phases, we give sufficient and necessary conditions for $N=2$, and sufficient conditions for $N>2$. These conditions are composed of $N$ layers of data, with each layer determined by the types of driving Hamiltonians. Our results also apply to the single quantum quench problem with $N=1$.