No Arabic abstract
Finite-temperature spin transport in the quantum Heisenberg spin chain is known to be superdiffusive, and has been conjectured to lie in the Kardar-Parisi-Zhang (KPZ) universality class. Using a kinetic theory of transport, we compute the KPZ coupling strength for the Heisenberg chain as a function of temperature, directly from microscopics; the results agree well with density-matrix renormalization group simulations. We establish a rigorous quantum-classical correspondence between the giant quasiparticles that govern superdiffusion and solitons in the classical continuous Landau-Lifshitz ferromagnet. We conclude that KPZ universality has the same origin in classical and quantum integrable isotropic magnets: a finite-temperature gas of low-energy classical solitons.
Superdiffusive finite-temperature transport has been recently observed in a variety of integrable systems with nonabelian global symmetries. Superdiffusion is caused by giant Goldstone-like quasiparticles stabilized by integrability. Here, we argue that these giant quasiparticles remain long-lived, and give divergent contributions to the low-frequency conductivity $sigma(omega)$, even in systems that are not perfectly integrable. We find, perturbatively, that $ sigma(omega) sim omega^{-1/3}$ for translation-invariant static perturbations that conserve energy, and $sigma(omega) sim | log omega |$ for noisy perturbations. The (presumable) crossover to regular diffusion appears to lie beyond low-order perturbation theory. By contrast, integrability-breaking perturbations that break the nonabelian symmetry yield conventional diffusion. Numerical evidence supports the distinction between these two classes of perturbations.
This review summarizes recent advances in our understanding of anomalous transport in spin chains, viewed through the lens of integrability. Numerical advances, based on tensor-network methods, have shown that transport in many canonical integrable spin chains -- most famously the Heisenberg model -- is anomalous. Concurrently, the framework of generalized hydrodynamics has been extended to explain some of the mechanisms underlying anomalous transport. We present what is currently understood about these mechanisms, and discuss how they resemble (and differ from) the mechanisms for anomalous transport in other contexts. We also briefly review potential transport anomalies in systems where integrability is an emergent or approximate property. We survey instances of anomalous transport and dynamics that remain to be understood.
The existence or absence of non-analytic cusps in the Loschmidt-echo return rate is traditionally employed to distinguish between a regular dynamical phase (regular cusps) and a trivial phase (no cusps) in quantum spin chains after a global quench. However, numerical evidence in a recent study [J. C. Halimeh and V. Zauner-Stauber, arXiv:1610.02019] suggests that instead of the trivial phase a distinct anomalous dynamical phase characterized by a novel type of non-analytic cusps occurs in the one-dimensional transverse-field Ising model when interactions are sufficiently long-range. Using an analytic semiclassical approach and exact diagonalization, we show that this anomalous phase also arises in the fully-connected case of infinite-range interactions, and we discuss its defining signature. Our results show that the transition from the regular to the anomalous dynamical phase coincides with Z2-symmetry breaking in the infinite-time limit, thereby showing a connection between two different concepts of dynamical criticality. Our work further expands the dynamical phase diagram of long-range interacting quantum spin chains, and can be tested experimentally in ion-trap setups and ultracold atoms in optical cavities, where interactions are inherently long-range.
The false vacuum decay has been a central theme in physics for half a century with applications to cosmology and to the theory of fundamental interactions. This fascinating phenomenon is even more intriguing when combined with the confinement of elementary particles. Due to the astronomical time scales involved, the research has so far focused on theoretical aspects of this decay. The purpose of this Letter is to show that the false vacuum decay is accessible to current optical experiments as quantum analog simulators of spin chains with confinement of the elementary excitations, which mimic the high energy phenomenology but in one spatial dimension. We study the non-equilibrium dynamics of the false vacuum in a quantum Ising chain and in an XXZ ladder. The false vacuum is the metastable state that arises in the ferromagnetic phase of the model when the symmetry is explicitly broken by a longitudinal field. This state decays through the formation of bubbles of true vacuum. Using iTEBD simulations, we are able to study the real-time evolution in the thermodynamic limit and measure the decay rate of local observables. We find that the numerical results agree with the theoretical prediction that the decay rate is exponentially small in the inverse of the longitudinal field.
Anomalous finite-temperature transport has recently been observed in numerical studies of various integrable models in one dimension; these models share the feature of being invariant under a continuous non-abelian global symmetry. This work offers a comprehensive group-theoretic account of this elusive phenomenon. For an integrable quantum model invariant under a global non-abelian simple Lie group $G$, we find that finite-temperature transport of Noether charges associated with symmetry $G$ in thermal states that are invariant under $G$ is universally superdiffusive and characterized by dynamical exponent $z = 3/2$. This conclusion holds regardless of the Lie algebra symmetry, local degrees of freedom (on-site representations), Lorentz invariance, or particular realization of microscopic interactions: we accordingly dub it as superuniversal. The anomalous transport behavior is attributed to long-lived giant quasiparticles dressed by thermal fluctuations. We provide an algebraic viewpoint on the corresponding dressing transformation and elucidate formal connections to fusion identities amongst the quantum-group characters. We identify giant quasiparticles with nonlinear soliton modes of classical field theories that describe low-energy excitations above ferromagnetic vacua. Our analysis of these field theories also provides a complete classification of the low-energy (i.e., Goldstone-mode) spectra of quantum isotropic ferromagnetic chains.