No Arabic abstract
We consider an open isotropic Heisenberg quantum spin chain, coupled at the ends to boundary reservoirs polarized in different directions, which sets up a twisting gradient across the chain. Using a matrix product ansatz, we calculate the exact magnetization profiles and magnetization currents in the nonequilibrium steady steady state of a chain with N sites. The magnetization profiles are harmonic functions with a frequency proportional to the twisting angle {theta}. The currents of the magnetization components lying in the twisting plane and in the orthogonal direction behave qualitatively differently: In-plane steady state currents scale as 1/N^2 for fixed and sufficiently large boundary coupling, and vanish as the coupling increases, while the transversal current increases with the coupling and saturates to 2{theta}/N.
We demonstrate that the exact non-equilibrium steady state of the one-dimensional Heisenberg XXZ spin chain driven by boundary Lindblad operators can be constructed explicitly with a matrix product ansatz for the non-equilibrium density matrix where the matrices satisfy a {it quadratic algebra}. This algebra turns out to be related to the quantum algebra $U_q[SU(2)]$. Coherent state techniques are introduced for the exact solution of the isotropic Heisenberg chain with and without quantum boundary fields and Lindblad terms that correspond to two different completely polarized boundary states. We show that this boundary twist leads to non-vanishing stationary currents of all spin components. Our results suggest that the matrix product ansatz can be extended to more general quantum systems kept far from equilibrium by Lindblad boundary terms.
An analytic method is proposed to compute the surface energy and elementary excitations of the XXZ spin chain with generic non-diagonal boundary fields. For the gapped case, in some boundary parameter regimes the contributions of the two boundary fields to the surface energy are non-additive. Such a correlation effect between the two boundaries also depends on the parity of the site number $N$ even in the thermodynamic limit $Ntoinfty$. For the gapless case, contributions of the two boundary fields to the surface energy are additive due to the absence of long-range correlation in the bulk. Although the $U(1)$ symmetry of the system is broken, exact spinon-like excitations, which obviously do not carry spin-$frac12$, are observed. The present method provides an universal procedure to deal with quantum integrable systems either with or without $U(1)$ symmetry.
The ground state and thermodynamics of a generalized spin-1/2 Ising-Heisenberg diamond chain with the second-neighbor interaction between nodal spins are calculated exactly using the mapping method based on the decoration-iteration transformation. Rigorous results for the magnetization, susceptibility, and heat capacity are investigated in dependence on temperature and magnetic field for the frustrated diamond spin chain with the antiferromagnetic Ising and Heisenberg interactions. It is demonstrated that the second-neighbor interaction between nodal spins gives rise to a greater diversity of low-temperature magnetization curves, which may include an intermediate plateau at two-third of the saturation magnetization related to the classical ferrimagnetic (up-up-up-down-up-up-...) ground state with translationally broken symmetry besides an intermediate one-third magnetization plateau reflecting the translationally invariant quantum ferrimagnetic (monomer-dimer) spin arrangement.
We present a generalization of Blochs theorem to finite-range lattice systems of independent fermions, in which translation symmetry is broken only by arbitrary boundary conditions, by providing exact, analytic expressions for all energy eigenvalues and eigenstates. By transforming the single-particle Hamiltonian into a corner-modified banded block-Toeplitz matrix, a key step is a bipartition of the lattice, which splits the eigenvalue problem into a system of bulk and boundary equations. The eigensystem inherits most of its solutions from an auxiliary, infinite translation-invariant Hamiltonian that allows for non-unitary representations of translation symmetry. A reformulation of the boundary equation in terms of a boundary matrix ensures compatibility with the boundary conditions, and determines the allowed energy eigenstates. We show how the boundary matrix captures the interplay between bulk and boundary properties, leading to efficient indicators of bulk-boundary correspondence. Remarkable consequences of our generalized Bloch theorem are the engineering of Hamiltonians that host perfectly localized, robust zero-energy edge modes, and the predicted emergence, e.g. in Kitaevs chain, of localized excitations whose amplitudes decay exponentially with a power-law prefactor. We further show how the theorem yields diagonalization algorithms for the class of Hamiltonians under consideration, and use the proposed bulk-boundary indicator to characterize the topological response of a multi-band time-reversal invariant s-wave superconductor under twisted boundary conditions, showing how a fractional Josephson effect can occur without a fermionic parity switch. Finally, we establish connections to the transfer matrix method and demonstrate, using the paradigmatic Kitaevs chain example, that a non-diagonalizable transfer matrix signals the presence of solutions with a power-law prefactor.
The collective and purely relaxational dynamics of quantum many-body systems after a quench at temperature $T=0$, from a disordered state to various phases is studied through the exact solution of the quantum Langevin equation of the spherical and the $O(n)$-model in the limit $ntoinfty$. The stationary state of the quantum dynamics is shown to be a non-equilibrium state. The quantum spherical and the quantum $O(n)$-model for $ntoinfty$ are in the same dynamical universality class. The long-time behaviour of single-time and two-time correlation and response functions is analysed and the universal exponents which characterise quantum coarsening and quantum ageing are derived. The importance of the non-Markovian long-time memory of the quantum noise is elucidated by comparing it with an effective Markovian noise having the same scaling behaviour and with the case of non-equilibrium classical dynamics.