One of the outstanding problems in non-equilibrium physics is to precisely understand when and how physically relevant observables in many-body systems equilibrate under unitary time evolution. General equilibration results show that equilibration is generic provided that the initial state has overlap with sufficiently many energy levels. But results not referring to typicality which show that natural initial states actually fulfill this condition are lacking. In this work, we present stringent results for equilibration for systems in which Rényi entanglement entropies in energy eigenstates with finite energy density are extensive for at least some, not necessarily connected, sub-system. Our results reverse the logic of common arguments, in that we derive equilibration from a weak condition akin to the eigenstate thermalization hypothesis, which is usually attributed to thermalization in systems that are assumed to equilibrate in the first place. We put the findings into the context of studies of many-body localization and many-body scars.Over recent years the study of the relaxation to equilibrium of complex many-body systems has attracted great attention. This interest can be motivated from at least two points of view. From a foundational viewpoint, it is desirable to understand how statistical equilibrium ensembles emerge within the framework of unitary quantum mechanics -without introducing any external probability measures. It is then necessary to first explain how systems undergoing unitary evolution attain equilibrium at all. A key ingredient to explain this behavior has been found to be the dynamical build-up of entanglement from low-entangled initial states and results showing equilibration under quite general conditions have been derived [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12]. The increase of entanglement over time is a generic feature of complex quantum systems and leads to an increase of the entropy of subsystems over time reminiscent to the second law of thermodynamics.From a more concrete perspective, the recent interest in the study of non-equilibrium dynamics is motivated by the fact that such dynamics can now be realized in well-controlled experiments, for example in ion traps or optical lattices [13][14][15][16][17][18]. Moreover, the discovery of many-body localized systems [19], which equilibrate [20] but fail to thermalize [18], shows that there remains much to be understood about the equilibration behavior of complex quantum systems. Despite the great progress in understanding the equilibration behavior of manybody systems, rigorous results showing that systems with natural initial states equilibrate to high precision based on concrete physical properties have been lacking.In this article we aim to fill this gap, by taking a new perspective to the problem. To do this, we carefully reconsider the entanglement content of energy eigenstates in complex, interacting many-body systems and devise a working-definition of "entanglement-ergodic" systems whose energy eigenstates at finite energy densi...
One of the defining features of many-body localization is the presence of extensively many quasi-local conserved quantities. These constants of motion constitute a corner-stone to an intuitive understanding of much of the phenomenology of many-body localized systems arising from effective Hamiltonians. They may be seen as local magnetization operators smeared out by a quasi-local unitary. However, accurately identifying such constants of motion remains a challenging problem. Current numerical constructions often capture the conserved operators only approximately restricting a conclusive understanding of many-body localization. In this work, we use methods from the theory of quantum many-body systems out of equilibrium to establish a new approach for finding a complete set of exact constants of motion which are in addition guaranteed to represent Pauli-z operators. By this we are able to construct and investigate the proposed effective Hamiltonian using exact diagonalization. Hence, our work provides an important tool expected to further boost inquiries into the breakdown of transport due to quenched disorder. arXiv:1707.05181v3 [cond-mat.stat-mech]
When pushed out of equilibrium, generic interacting quantum systems equilibrate locally and are expected to evolve towards a locally thermal description despite their unitary time evolution. Systems in which disorder competes with interactions and transport can violate this expectation by exhibiting many-body localization. The strength of the disorder with respect to the other two parameters drives a transition from a thermalizing system towards a non-thermalizing one. The existence of this transition is well established both in experimental and numerical studies for finite systems. However, the stability of many-body localization in the thermodynamic limit is largely unclear. With increasing system size, a generic disordered system will contain with high probability areas of low disorder variation. If large and frequent enough, those areas constitute ergodic grains which can hybridize and thus compete with localization. While the details of this process are not yet settled, it is conceivable that if such regions appear sufficiently often, they might be powerful enough to restore thermalization. We set out to shed light on this problem by constructing potential landscapes with low disorder regions and numerically investigating their localization behavior in the Heisenberg model. Our findings suggest that many-body localization may be much more stable than anticipated in other recent theoretical works.
Interacting quantum many-body systems are expected to thermalize, in the sense that the evolution of local expectation values approaches a stationary value resembling a thermal ensemble. This intuition is notably contradicted in systems exhibiting many-body localisation (MBL). In stark contrast to the non-interacting case of Anderson localisation, the entanglement of states grows without limit over time, albeit slowly. In this work, we establish a novel link between quantum information theory and notions of condensed matter physics, capturing this phenomenon in the Heisenberg picture. We show that the mere existence of local constants of motion, often taken as the defining property of MBL, together with a generic spectrum of the Hamiltonian, is already sufficient to rigorously prove information propagation: these systems can be used to send a classical bit over arbitrary distances, in that the impact of a local perturbation can be detected arbitrarily far away. This counterintuitive result is compatible with and further corroborates the intuition of a slow entanglement growth following global quenches in MBL systems. We perform a detailed perturbation analysis of quasi-local constants of motion and also show that they indeed can be used to construct efficient spectral tensor networks, as recently suggested. Our results provide a detailed and at the same time model-independent picture of information propagation in MBL systems.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.
hi@scite.ai
10624 S. Eastern Ave., Ste. A-614
Henderson, NV 89052, USA
Copyright © 2024 scite LLC. All rights reserved.
Made with 💙 for researchers
Part of the Research Solutions Family.