No Arabic abstract
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.
We numerically analyse the behavior of the full distribution of collective observables in quantum spin chains. While most of previous studies of quantum critical phenomena are limited to the first moments, here we demonstrate how quantum fluctuations at criticality lead to highly non-Gaussian distributions thus violating the central limit theorem. Interestingly, we show that the distributions for different system sizes collapse after scaling on the same curve for a wide range of transitions: first and second order quantum transitions and transitions of the Berezinskii-Kosterlitz-Thouless type. We propose and carefully analyse the feasibility of an experimental reconstruction of the distribution using light-matter interfaces for atoms in optical lattices or in optical resonators.
Using an infinite Matrix Product State (iMPS) technique based on the time-dependent variational principle (TDVP), we study two major types of dynamical phase transitions (DPT) in the one-dimensional transverse-field Ising model (TFIM) with long-range power-law ($propto1/r^{alpha}$ with $r$ inter-spin distance) interactions out of equilibrium in the thermodynamic limit -- textit{DPT-I}: based on an order parameter in a (quasi-)steady state, and textit{DPT-II}: based on non-analyticities (cusps) in the Loschmidt-echo return rate. We construct the corresponding rich dynamical phase diagram, whilst considering different quench initial conditions. We find a nontrivial connection between both types of DPT based on their critical lines. Moreover, and very interestingly, we detect a new DPT-II dynamical phase in a certain range of interaction exponent $alpha$, characterized by what we call textit{anomalous cusps} that are distinct from the textit{regular cusps} usually associated with DPT-II. Our results provide the characterization of experimentally accessible signatures of the dynamical phases studied in this work.
Using the framework of infinite Matrix Product States, the existence of an textit{anomalous} dynamical phase for the transverse-field Ising chain with sufficiently long-range interactions was first reported in [J.~C.~Halimeh and V.~Zauner-Stauber, arXiv:1610:02019], where it was shown that textit{anomalous} cusps arise in the Loschmidt-echo return rate for sufficiently small quenches within the ferromagnetic phase. In this work we further probe the nature of the anomalous phase through calculating the corresponding Fisher-zero lines in the complex time plane. We find that these Fisher-zero lines exhibit a qualitative difference in their behavior, where, unlike in the case of the regular phase, some of them terminate before intersecting the imaginary axis, indicating the existence of smooth peaks in the return rate preceding the cusps. Additionally, we discuss in detail the infinite Matrix Product State time-evolution method used to calculate Fisher zeros and the Loschmidt-echo return rate using the Matrix Product State transfer matrix. Our work sheds further light on the nature of the anomalous phase in the long-range transverse-field Ising chain, while the numerical treatment presented can be applied to more general quantum spin chains.
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.
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.