We study the dynamics of a quantum Ising chain after the sudden introduction of a non-integrable long-range interaction. Via an exact mapping onto a fully-connected lattice of hard-core bosons, we show that a pre-thermal state emerges and we investigate its features by focusing on a class of physically relevant observables. In order to gain insight into the eventual thermalization, we outline a diagrammatic approach which complements the study of the previous quasi-stationary state and provides the basis for a self-consistent solution of the kinetic equation. This analysis suggests that both the temporal decay towards the pre-thermal state and the crossover to the eventual thermal one may occur algebraically.
Eigenstate Thermalization Hypothesis provides one picture of thermalization in a quantum system by looking at individual eigenstates. However, it is also important to consider how local observables reach equilibrium values dynamically. Quench protocol is one of the settings to study such questions. A recent numerical study [Ba~{n}uls, Cirac, and Hastings, Phys. Rev. Lett. 106, 050405 (2011)] of a nonintegrable quantum Ising model with longitudinal field under such quench setting found different behaviors for different initial quantum states. One particular case called weak thermalization regime showed apparently persistent oscillations of some observables. Here we provide an explanation of such oscillations. We note that the corresponding initial state has low energy density relative to the ground state of the model. We then use perturbation theory near the ground state and identify the oscillation frequency as essentially a quasiparticle gap. With this quasiparticle picture, we can then address the long-time behavior of the oscillations. Upon making additional approximations which intuitively should only make thermalization weaker, we argue that the oscillations nevertheless decay in the long time limit. As part of our arguments, we also consider a quench from a BEC to a hard-core boson model in one dimension. We find that the expectation value of a single-boson creation operator oscillates but decays exponentially in time, while a pair-boson creation operator has oscillations with a $t^{-3/2}$ decay in time. We also study dependence of the decay time on the density of bosons in the low-density regime and use this to estimate decay time for oscillations in the original spin model.
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 $O(n^{1/2})$.
Recently, a non-trivial relation between the quasi-particle spectrum and entanglement entropy production was discovered in non-integrable quenches in the paramagnetic Ising quantum spin chain. Here we study the dynamics of analogous quenches in the quantum Potts spin chain. Tuning the parameters of the system, we observe a sudden increase in the entanglement production rate, which is shown to be related to the appearance of new quasiparticle excitations in the post-quench spectrum. Our results demonstrate the generality of the effect and support its interpretation as the non-equilibrium version of the well-known Gibbs paradox related to mixing entropy which appears in systems with a non-trivial quasi-particle spectrum.
We study the time evolution of the logarithmic negativity after a global quantum quench. In a 1+1 dimensional conformal invariant field theory, we consider the negativity between two intervals which can be either adjacent or disjoint. We show that the negativity follows the quasi-particle interpretation for the spreading of entanglement. We check and generalise our findings with a systematic analysis of the negativity after a quantum quench in the harmonic chain, highlighting two peculiar lattice effects: the late birth and the sudden death of entanglement.
We investigate the evolution of string order in a spin-1 chain following a quantum quench. After initializing the chain in the Affleck-Kennedy-Lieb-Tasaki state, we analyze in detail how string order evolves as a function of time at different length scales. The Hamiltonian after the quench is chosen either to preserve or to suddenly break the symmetry which ensures the presence of string order. Depending on which of these two situations arises, string order is either preserved or lost even at infinitesimal times in the thermodynamic limit. The fact that non-local order may be abruptly destroyed, what we call string-order melting, makes it qualitatively different from typical order parameters in the manner of Landau. This situation is thoroughly characterized by means of numerical simulations based on matrix product states algorithms and analytical studies based on a short-time expansion for several simplified models.