All Publications

The laws of thermodynamics require any initial macroscopic inhomogeneity in extended many-body systems to be smoothed out by the time evolution through the activation of transport processes. In generic quantum systems, transport is expected to be governed by a diffusion law, whereas a sufficiently strong quenched disorder can suppress it completely due to many-body localization of quantum excitations. Here, we show that the confinement of quasiparticles can also suppress transport even if the dynamics are generated by nondisordered Hamiltonians. We demonstrate this in the quantum Ising chain with transverse and longitudinal magnetic fields, prepared in a paradigmatic state with a domain wall and thus with a spatially varying energy density. We perform extensive numerical simulations of the dynamics which turn out to be in excellent agreement with an effective analytical description valid within both weak and strong confinement regimes. Our results show that the energy flow from "hot" to "cold" regions of the chain is suppressed for all accessible times. We argue that this phenomenon is general, as it relies solely on the emergence of confinement of excitations.

We study the propagation of entanglement after quantum quenches in the nonintegrable paramagnetic quantum Ising spin chain. Tuning the parameters of the system, we observe a sudden increase in the entanglement production rate, which we show to be related to the appearance of new quasiparticle excitations in the postquench spectrum. We argue that the phenomenon is the nonequilibrium version of the well-known Gibbs paradox related to mixing entropy and demonstrate that its characteristics fit the expectations derived from the quantum resolution of the paradox in systems with a nontrivial quasiparticle spectrum.

We study the nonequilibrium dynamics of a one-dimensional Bose gas trapped by a harmonic potential for a quench from zero to infinite interaction. The different thermodynamic limits required for the equilibrium pre- and post-quench Hamiltonians are the origin of a few unexpected phenomena that have no counterparts in the translational-invariant setting. We find that the dynamics is perfectly periodic with breathing time related to the strength of the trapping potential. For very short times, we observe a sudden expansion leading to an extreme dilution of the gas and to the emergence of slowly decaying tails in the density profile. The haste of the expansion induces an undertow-like effect with a pronounced local minimum of the density at the center of the trap. At half period there is a refocusing phenomenon characterized by a sharp central peak of the density, juxtaposed to algebraically decaying tails. We finally show that the time-averaged density is correctly captured by a generalized Gibbs ensemble built with the conserved mode occupations.

We consider the out-of-equilibrium dynamics generated by joining two domains with arbitrary opposite magnetizations. We study the stationary state which emerges by the unitary evolution via the spin-1/2 XXZ Hamiltonian, in the gapless regime, where the system develops a stationary spin current. Using the generalized hydrodynamic approach, we present a simple formula for the space-time profile of the spin current and the magnetization exact in the limit of long times. As a remarkable effect, we show that the stationary state has a strongly discontinuous dependence on the strength of interaction as confirmed by the exact analytic expression of the Drude weight that we compute. These features allow us to give a qualitative estimation for the transient behavior of the current which is in good agreement with numerical simulations. Moreover, we analyze the behavior around the edge of the magnetization profile, and we argue that, unlike the XX free-fermionic point, interactions always prevent the emergence of a Tracy-Widom scaling.

We consider the nonequilibrium protocol where two semi-infinite gapped XXZ chains, initially prepared in different equilibrium states, are suddenly joined together. At large times, a generalized hydrodynamic description applies, according to which the system can locally be represented by space- and time-dependent stationary states. The magnetization displays an unusual behavior: depending on the initial state, its profile may exhibit abrupt jumps that can not be predicted directly from the standard hydrodynamic equations and which signal nonballistic spin transport. We ascribe this phenomenon to the structure of the local conservation laws and make a prediction for the exact location of the jumps. We find that the jumps propagate at the velocities of the heaviest quasiparticles. By means of time-dependent density matrix renormalization group simulations we show that our theory yields a complete description of the long-time steady profiles of conserved charges, currents, and local correlations.

The spin-1/2 Heisenberg chain exhibits a quantum critical regime characterized by quasi long-range magnetic order at zero temperature. We quantify the strength of quantum fluctuations in the ground state by determining the probability distributions of the components of the (staggered) subsystem magnetization. Some of these exhibit scaling and the corresponding universal scaling functions can be determined by free fermion methods and by exploiting a relation with the boundary sine-Gordon model.

We construct exact steady states of unitary nonequilibrium time evolution in the gapless XXZ spin-1/2 chain where integrability preserves ballistic spin transport at long times. We characterize the quasilocal conserved quantities responsible for this feature and introduce a computationally effective way to evaluate their expectation values on generic matrix product initial states. We employ this approach to reproduce the long-time limit of local observables in all quantum quenches which explicitly break particle-hole or time-reversal symmetry. We focus on a class of initial states supporting persistent spin currents and our predictions remarkably agree with numerical simulations at long times. Furthermore, we propose a protocol for this model where interactions, even when antiferromagnetic, are responsible for the unbounded growth of a macroscopic magnetic domain.

We consider the general problem of quenching an interacting Bose gas from the noninteracting regime to the strongly repulsive limit described by the Tonks-Girardeau gas with the initial state being a Gaussian ensemble in terms of the bosons. A generic multipoint correlation function in the steady state can be described fully in terms of a Fredholm-like determinant suitable both for a numerical and for an analytical study in certain limiting cases. Finally, we extend the study to the presence of a smooth confining potential showing that, in the thermodynamic limit, the time evolution of the two-point function can be mapped to a classical problem.

Quarks cannot be observed as free particles in nature because they are confined into baryons and mesons, as a result of the fact that the strong interaction between them increases with their separation. However, it is less known that this phenomenon also occurs in condensed matter and statistical physics as experimentally proved in several quasi-1D compounds. Most of the theoretical and experimental studies so far concentrated on understanding the consequences of confinement for the equilibrium physics of both high-energy and condensed matter systems. Here, instead we show that confinement has dramatic consequences for the non-equilibrium dynamics following a quantum quench and that these effects could be exploited as a quantitative probe of confinement.

We consider the nonequilibrium time evolution of piecewise homogeneous states in the XXZ spin-1/2 chain, a paradigmatic example of an interacting integrable model. The initial state can be thought of as the result of joining chains with different global properties. Through dephasing, at late times, the state becomes locally equivalent to a stationary state which explicitly depends on position and time. We propose a kinetic theory of elementary excitations and derive a continuity equation which fully characterizes the thermodynamics of the model. We restrict ourselves to the gapless phase and consider cases where the chains are prepared: (1) at different temperatures, (2) in the ground state of two different models, and (3) in the "domain wall" state. We find excellent agreement (any discrepancy is within the numerical error) between theoretical predictions and numerical simulations of time evolution based on time-evolving block decimation algorithms. As a corollary, we unveil an exact expression for the expectation values of the charge currents in a generic stationary state.

In contrast to lattice systems where powerful numerical techniques such as matrix product state based methods are available to study the non-equilibrium dynamics, the non-equilibrium behaviour of continuum systems is much harder to simulate. We demonstrate here that Hamiltonian truncation methods can be efficiently applied to this problem, by studying the quantum quench dynamics of the 1+1 dimensional Ising field theory using a truncated free fermionic space approach. After benchmarking the method with integrable quenches corresponding to changing the mass in a free Majorana fermion field theory, we study the effect of an integrability breaking perturbation by the longitudinal magnetic field. In both the ferromagnetic and paramagnetic phases of the model we find persistent oscillations with frequencies set by the low-lying particle excitations not only for small, but even for moderate size quenches. In the ferromagnetic phase these particles are the various non-perturbative confined bound states of the domain wall excitations, while in the paramagnetic phase the single magnon excitation governs the dynamics, allowing us to capture the time evolution of the magnetisation using a combination of known results from perturbation theory and form factor based methods. We point out that the dominance of low lying excitations allows for the numerical or experimental determination of the mass spectra through the study of the quench dynamics.

We consider an interaction quench in the critical spin-12 Heisenberg XXZ chain. We numerically compute the time evolution of the two-point correlation functions of spin operators in the thermodynamic limit and compare the results to predictions obtained in the framework of the Luttinger liquid approximation. We find that the transverse correlation function (SjxSj+x) agrees with the Luttinger model prediction to a surprising level of accuracy. The agreement for the longitudinal two-point function (SjzSj+z) is found to be much poorer. We speculate that this difference between transverse and longitudinal correlations has its origin in the locality properties of the respective spin operator with respect to the underlying fermionic modes.

We studied the non-equilibrium quench dynamics from free to hardcore 1D bosons in the presence of a hard-wall confining potential. The density profile and the two-point fermionic correlation function in the stationary state as well as their full time evolution was characterised. It was found that for long times the system relaxes to a uniform density profile, but the correlation function memorises the initial state with a stationary algebraic long-distance decay, which is opposite to the exponential behaviour found for the same quench in the periodic setup. We also compute the stationary bosonic two-point correlator which was found to decay exponentially for large distances. A two-step mechanism was shown to govern the time evolution; a quick approach to an almost stationary value was followed by a slow algebraic relaxation to the true stationary state.

We consider a non-interacting Fermi gas in d dimensions, both in the non-relativistic and relativistic case. The system of size Ld is initially prepared into two halves L and R, each of them thermalized at two different temperatures, TL and TR respectively. At time t = 0 the two halves are put in contact and the entire system is left to evolve unitarily. We show that, in the thermodynamic limit, the time evolution of the particle and energy densities is perfectly described by a semiclassical approach which permits to analytically evaluate the corresponding stationary currents. In particular, in the case of non-relativistic fermions, we find a low-temperature behavior for the particle and energy currents which is independent from the dimensionality d of the system, being proportional to the difference TL2-TR2 . Only in one spatial dimension (d = 1) do the results for the non-relativistic case agree with the massless relativistic ones. © 2014 IOP Publishing Ltd and SISSA Medialab srl.

We consider a quantum quench in a noninteracting fermionic one-dimensional field theory. The system of size L is initially prepared into two halves L ([-L/2,0]) and R ([0,L/2]), each of them thermalized at two different temperatures TL and TR, respectively. At a given time, the two halves are joined together by a local coupling and the whole system is left to evolve unitarily. For an infinitely extended system (L→), we show that the time evolution of the particle and energy densities is well described via a hydrodynamic approach which allows us to evaluate the correspondent stationary currents. We show, in such a case, that the two-point correlation functions are deduced, at large times, from a simple nonequilibrium steady state. Otherwise, whenever the boundary conditions are retained (in a properly defined thermodynamic limit), any current is suppressed at large times, and the stationary state is described by a generalized Gibbs ensemble, which is diagonal and depends only on the post-quench mode occupation. © 2014 American Physical Society.

We consider the time evolution after quantum quenches in the spin-12 Heisenberg XXZ quantum spin chain with Ising-type anisotropy. The time evolution of short-distance spin-spin correlation functions is studied by numerical tensor network techniques for a variety of initial states, including Néel and Majumdar-Ghosh states and the ground state of the XXZ chain at large values of the anisotropy. The various correlators appear to approach stationary values, which are found to be in good agreement with the results of exact calculations of stationary expectation values in appropriate generalized Gibbs ensembles. In particular, our analysis shows how symmetries of the post-quench Hamiltonian that are broken by particular initial states are restored at late times. © 2014 American Physical Society.

It is widely believed that the stationary properties after a quantum quench in integrable systems can be described by a generalized Gibbs ensemble (GGE), even if all of the analytical evidence is based on free theories in which the pre- and postquench modes are linearly related. In contrast, we consider the experimentally relevant quench of the one-dimensional Bose gas from zero to infinite interaction, in which the relation between modes is nonlinear, and consequently Wick's theorem does not hold. We provide exact analytical results for the time evolution of the dynamical density-density correlation function at any time after the quench and we prove that its stationary value is described by a GGE in which Wick's theorem is restored. © 2014 American Physical Society.

We analyze the entanglement properties of the asymptotic steady state after a quench from free to hard-core bosons in one dimension. The Rényi and von Neumann entanglement entropies are found to be extensive, and the latter coincides with the thermodynamic entropy of the generalized Gibbs ensemble (GGE). Computing the spectrum of the two-point function, we provide exact analytical results for both the leading extensive parts and the subleading terms for the entropies as well as for the cumulants of the particle-number fluctuations. We also compare the extensive part of the entanglement entropy with the thermodynamic ones, showing that the GGE entropy equals the entanglement one and it is twice the diagonal entropy. © 2014 IOP Publishing Ltd and SISSA Medialab srl.

We consider the non-equilibrium dynamics of a gas of impenetrable bosons released from a harmonic trapping potential to a circle. The many-body dynamics is solved analytically and the time dependence of all the physically relevant correlations is described. We prove that, for large times and in the thermodynamic limit, the reduced density matrix of any subsystem converges to a generalized Gibbs ensemble as a consequence of the integrability of the model. We discuss the approach to stationary behavior at late times. We also describe the time dependence of the entanglement entropy which attains a very simple form in the stationary state. © 2013 IOP Publishing Ltd and SISSA Medialab srl.

We study the nonequilibrium dynamics of a Tonks-Girardeau gas released from a parabolic trap to a circle. We present the exact analytic solution of the many body dynamics and prove that, for large times and in a properly defined thermodynamic limit, the reduced density matrix of any finite subsystem converges to a generalized Gibbs ensemble. The equilibration mechanism is expected to be the same for all one-dimensional systems. © 2013 American Physical Society.