Boundary Perturbation Effects in Quantum Systems with Conserved Energy and Continuous Symmetry

Abstract

We investigate one-dimensional systems with both energy conservation and a continuous symmetry, focusing on the impact of a boundary perturbation that breaks the continuous symmetry. Our study reveals two distinct dynamical phases: one in which the corresponding charge exhibits extensive fluctuations, and another where the charge remains conserved. These phases appear in both free and interacting models. We interpret this behavior through a boundary-induced pumping mechanism, which estimates the amplitude connecting two degenerate states from different charge sectors via a local charge-non-conserving operator. In the Floquet setting, we show that the frozen phase can survive at high driving frequencies but vanishes at low frequencies. This phenomenon is exact in free-fermion systems in the thermodynamic limit, but in interacting systems it appears only at finite system size. The emergence of the charge-frozen phase is attributed to effective energy conservation, and we demonstrate that this phase disappears when effective energy conservation is broken or replaced by other symmetries.

22 pages, 14 figures

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