Emergent Universal Quench Dynamics in Randomly Interacting Spin Models

Abstract

Universality often emerges in low-energy equilibrium physics of quantum many-body systems, despite their microscopic complexity and variety. Recently, there has been a growing interest in studying far-from-equilibrium dynamics of quantum many-body systems. Such dynamics usually involves highly excited states beyond the traditional low-energy theory description. Whether universal behaviors can also emerge in such non-equilibrium dynamics is a central issue at the frontier of quantum dynamics. Here we report the experimental observation of universal dynamics by monitoring the spin depolarization process in a solid-state NMR system described by an ensemble of randomly interacting spins. The spin depolarization can be related to temporal spin-spin correlation functions at high temperatures. We discover a remarkable phenomenon that these correlation functions obey a universal functional form. This experimental fact helps us identify the dominant interacting processes in the spin depolarization dynamics that lead to this universality. Our observation demonstrates the existence of universality even in non-equilibrium dynamics at high temperatures, thereby complementing the well-established universality in low-energy physics.

10 pages, 4 figures; Supplementary Information 26 pages, 11 figures, 2 tables

References in corpus (8)

• Kardar-Parisi-Zhang physics in the quantum Heisenberg magnet
• Relating out-of-time-order correlations to entanglement via multiple-quantum coherences
• NMR quantum simulation of localization effects induced by decoherence
• The quasi-normal modes of quantum criticality
• Effective one-body dynamics in multiple-quantum NMR experiments
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• Universal Hypothesis of Autocorrelation Function from Krylov Complexity

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• Sensing Out-of-Equilibrium and Quantum Non-Gaussian environments via induced Time-Reversal Symmetry Breaking on the quantum-probe dynamics
• Diagnosing quantum transport from wave function snapshots
• Hybrid Brownian SYK-Hubbard Model: from Spectral Function to Quantum Chaos
• Statistics-encoded tensor network approach in disordered quantum many-body spin chains