Quantum Quenches, Thermalization and Many-Body Localization
arXiv:1006.1634 · doi:10.1103/PhysRevB.83.094431
Abstract
We conjecture that thermalization following a quantum quench in a strongly correlated quantum system is closely connected to many-body delocalization in the space of quasi-particles. This scenario is tested in the anisotropic Heisenberg spin chain with different types of integrability-breaking terms. We first quantify the deviations from integrability by analyzing the level spacing statistics and the inverse participation ratio of the system's eigenstates. We then focus on thermalization, by studying the dynamics after a sudden quench of the anisotropy parameter. Our numerical simulations clearly support the conjecture, as long as the integrability-breaking term acts homogeneously on the quasiparticle space, in such a way as to induce ergodicity over all the relevant Hilbert space.
8 pages
References in corpus (16)
- Thermalization and its mechanism for generic isolated quantum systems
- Localization of interacting fermions at high temperature
- Many body localization in Heisenberg XXZ magnet in a random field
- Quench dynamics and non equilibrium phase diagram of the Bose-Hubbard model
- Breakdown of thermalization in finite one-dimensional systems
- The Luttinger model following a sudden interaction switch-on
- Dynamical phase transition in correlated fermionic lattice systems
- Exact relaxation in a class of non-equilibrium quantum lattice systems
- Dephasing and the steady state in quantum many-particle systems
- Strongly correlated fermions after a quantum quench
- Effective thermal dynamics following a quantum quench in a spin chain
- Nonthermal steady states after an interaction quench in the Falicov-Kimball model
- Quantum chaos and thermalization in gapped systems
- Quenches in quantum many-body systems: One-dimensional Bose-Hubbard model reexamined
- Correlations in an expanding gas of hard-core bosons
- Quantum Chaos, Delocalization, and Entanglement in Disordered Heisenberg Models