No Arabic abstract
We develop a flow renormalization approach for periodically-driven quantum systems, which reveals prethermal dynamical regimes and associated timescales via direct correspondence between real time and flow time behavior. In this formalism, the dynamical problem is recast in terms of coupling constants of the theory flowing towards an attractive fixed point that represents the thermal Floquet Hamiltonian at long times, while narrowly avoiding a series of unstable fixed points which determine distinct prethermal regimes at intermediate times. We study a class of relevant perturbations that trigger the onset of heating and thermalization, and demonstrate that the renormalization flow has an elegant representation in terms of a flow of matrix product operators. Our results permit microscopic calculations of the emergence of distinct dynamical regimes directly in the thermodynamic limit in an efficient manner, establishing a new computational tool for driven non-equilibrium systems.
Prethermalization, by introducing emergent quasiconserved observables, plays a crucial role in protecting Floquet many-body phases over exponentially long time, while the ultimate fate of such quasiconserved operators can signal thermalization to infinite temperature. To elucidate the properties of prethermal quasiconservation in many-body Floquet systems, here we systematically analyze infinite temperature correlations between observables. We numerically show that the late-time behavior of the autocorrelations unambiguously distinguishes quasiconserved observables from non-conserved ones, allowing to single out a set of linearly-independent quasiconserved observables. By investigating two Floquet spin models, we identify two different mechanism underlying the quasi-conservation law. First, we numerically verify energy quasiconservation when the driving frequency is large, so that the system dynamics is approximately described by a static prethermal Hamiltonian. More interestingly, under moderate driving frequency, another quasiconserved observable can still persist if the Floquet driving contains a large global rotation. We show theoretically how to calculate this conserved observable and provide numerical verification. Having systematically identified all quasiconserved observables, we can finally investigate their behavior in the infinite-time limit and thermodynamic limit, using autocorrelations obtained from both numerical simulation and experiments in solid state nuclear magnetic resonance systems.
An open quantum system, whose time evolution is governed by a master equation, can be driven into a given pure quantum state by an appropriate design of the system-reservoir coupling. This points out a route towards preparing many body states and non-equilibrium quantum phases by quantum reservoir engineering. Here we discuss in detail the example of a emph{driven dissipative Bose Einstein Condensate} of bosons and of paired fermions, where atoms in an optical lattice are coupled to a bath of Bogoliubov excitations via the atomic current representing emph{local dissipation}. In the absence of interactions the lattice gas is driven into a pure state with long range order. Weak interactions lead to a weakly mixed state, which in 3D can be understood as a depletion of the condensate, and in 1D and 2D exhibits properties reminiscent of a Luttinger liquid or a Kosterlitz-Thouless critical phase at finite temperature, with the role of the ``finite temperature played by the interactions.
We present exact results on a novel kind of emergent random matrix universality that quantum many-body systems at infinite temperature can exhibit. Specifically, we consider an ensemble of pure states supported on a small subsystem, generated from projective measurements of the remainder of the system in a local basis. We rigorously show that the ensemble, derived for a class of quantum chaotic systems undergoing quench dynamics, approaches a universal form completely independent of system details: it becomes uniformly distributed in Hilbert space. This goes beyond the standard paradigm of quantum thermalization, which dictates that the subsystem relaxes to an ensemble of quantum states that reproduces the expectation values of local observables in a thermal mixed state. Our results imply more generally that the distribution of quantum states themselves becomes indistinguishable from those of uniformly random ones, i.e. the ensemble forms a quantum state-design in the parlance of quantum information theory. Our work establishes bridges between quantum many-body physics, quantum information and random matrix theory, by showing that pseudo-random states can arise from isolated quantum dynamics, opening up new ways to design applications for quantum state tomography and benchmarking.
We investigate the effect of quantum errors on a monitored Brownian Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev (SYK) model featuring a measurement-induced phase transition that can be understood as a symmetry-breaking transition of an effective $Z_4$ magnet in the replica space. The errors describe the loss of information about the measurement outcomes and are applied during the non-unitary evolution or at the end of the evolution. In the former case, we find that this error can be mapped to an emergent magnetic field in the $Z_4$ magnet, and as a consequence, the symmetry is explicitly broken independent of the measurement rate. Renyi entropies computed by twisting boundary conditions now generate domain walls even in the would-be symmetric phase at a high measurement rate. The entropy is therefore volume-law irrespective of the measurement rate. In the latter case, the error-induced magnetic field only exists near the boundary of the magnet. Varying the magnetic field leads to a pinning transition of domain walls, corresponding to error threshold of the quantum code prepared by the non-unitary SYK dynamics.
Quantum chaos in many-body systems provides a bridge between statistical and quantum physics with strong predictive power. This framework is valuable for analyzing properties of complex quantum systems such as energy spectra and the dynamics of thermalization. While contemporary methods in quantum chaos often rely on random ensembles of quantum states and Hamiltonians, this is not reflective of most real-world systems. In this paper, we introduce a new perspective: across a wide range of examples, a single non-random quantum state is shown to encode universal and highly random quantum state ensembles. We characterize these ensembles using the notion of quantum state $k$-designs from quantum information theory and investigate their universality using a combination of analytic and numerical techniques. In particular, we establish that $k$-designs arise naturally from generic states as well as individual states associated with strongly interacting, time-independent Hamiltonian dynamics. Our results offer a new approach for studying quantum chaos and provide a practical method for sampling approximately uniformly random states; the latter has wide-ranging applications in quantum information science from tomography to benchmarking.