No Arabic abstract
Motivated by recent experiments with ultra-cold quantum gases in optical lattices we study the decay of the staggered moment in the one-dimensional Fermi-Hubbard model starting from a perfect Neel state using exact diagonalization and the iTEBD method. This extends previous work in which the same problem has been addressed for pure spin Hamiltonians. As a main result, we show that the relaxation dynamics of the double occupancy and of the staggered moment are different. The former is controlled by the nearest-neighbor tunneling rate while the latter is much slower and strongly dependent on the interaction strength, indicating that spin excitations are important. This difference in characteristic energy scales for the fast charge dynamics and the much slower spin dynamics is also reflected in the real-time evolution of nearest-neighbor density and spin correlations. A very interesting time dependence emerges in the von Neumann entropy, which at short times increases linearly with a slope proportional to the tunneling matrix element while the long-time growth of entanglement is controlled by spin excitations. Our predictions for the different relaxation dynamics of the staggered moment and the double occupancy should be observable in state-of-the art optical lattice experiments. We further compare time averages of the double occupancy to both the expectation values in the canonical and diagonal ensemble, which quantitatively disagree with each other on finite systems. We relate the question of thermalization to the eigenstate thermalization hypothesis.
We study the unitary time evolution of antiferromagnetic order in the Hubbard model after a quench starting from the perfect Neel state. In this setup, which is well suited for experiments with cold atoms, one can distinguish fundamentally different pathways for melting of long-range order at weak and strong interaction. In the Mott insulating regime, melting of long-range order occurs due to the ultra-fast transfer of energy from charge excitations to the spin background, while local magnetic moments and their exchange coupling persist during the process. The latter can be demonstrated by a local spin-precession experiment. At weak interaction, local moments decay along with the long-range order. The dynamics is governed by residual quasiparticles, which are reflected in oscillations of the off-diagonal components of the momentum distribution. Such oscillations provide an alternative route to study the prethermalization phenomenon and its influence on the dynamics away from the integrable (noninteracting) limit. The Hubbard model is solved within nonequilibrium dynamical mean-field theory, using the density matrix-renormalization group as an impurity solver.
We investigate the real-time dynamics of the half-filled one-dimensional extended Hubbard model in the strong-coupling regime, when driven by a transient laser pulse. Starting from a wide regime displaying a charge-density wave in equilibrium, a robust photoinduced in-gap state appears in the optical conductivity, depending on the parameters of the pulse. Here, by tuning its conditions, we maximize the overlap of the time-evolving wavefunction with excited states displaying the elusive bond-ordered wave of this model. Finally, we make a clear connection between the emergence of this order and the formation of the aforementioned in-gap state, suggesting the potential observation of purely electronic (i.e., not associated with a Peierls instability) bond-ordered waves in experiments involving molecular crystals.
Based on tensor network simulations, we discuss the emergence of dynamical quantum phase transitions (DQPTs) in a half-filled one-dimensional lattice described by the extended Fermi-Hubbard model. Considering different initial states, namely noninteracting, metallic, insulating spin and charge density waves, we identify several types of sudden interaction quenches which lead to dynamical criticality. In different scenarios, clear connections between DQPTs and particular properties of the mean double occupation or charge imbalance can be established. Dynamical transitions resulting solely from high-frequency time-periodic modulation are also found, which are well described by a Floquet effective Hamiltonian. State-of-the-art cold-atom quantum simulators constitute ideal platforms to implement several reported DQPTs experimentally.
We study the real-time and real-space dynamics of charge in the one-dimensional Hubbard model in the limit of high temperatures. To this end, we prepare pure initial states with sharply peaked density profiles and calculate the time evolution of these nonequilibrium states, by using numerical forward-propagation approaches to chains as long as 20 sites. For a class of typical states, we find excellent agreement with linear-response theory and unveil the existence of remarkably clean charge diffusion in the regime of strong particle-particle interactions. Moreover, we demonstrate that this diffusive behavior does not depend on certain details of our initial conditions, i.e., it occurs for five different realizations with random and nonrandom internal degrees of freedom, single and double occupation of the central site, and displacement of spin-up and spin-down particles.
Non-Hermitian phenomena offer a novel approach to analyze and interpret spectra in the presence of interactions. Using the density-matrix renormalization group (DMRG), we demonstrate the existence of exceptional points for the one-particle Greens function of the 1D alternating Hubbard chain with chiral symmetry, with a corresponding Fermi arc at zero frequency in the spectrum. They result from the non-Hermiticity of the effective Hamiltonian describing the Greens function and only appear at finite temperature. They are robust and can be topologically characterized by the zeroth Chern number. This effect illustrates a case where temperature has a strong effect in 1D beyond the simple broadening of spectral features. Finally, we demonstrate that exceptional points appear even in the two-particle Greens function (charge structure factor) where an effective Hamiltonian is difficult to establish, but move away from zero frequency due to a distinct symmetry constraint.