Quantum Nonequilibrium Dynamics: Transport, Entanglement, and Thermalization

Abstract

We study three aspects of quantum nonequilibrium dynamics;

(1) transport of conserved quantities, (2) entanglement spreading, and (3) construction of local operators which slowly relax to thermal equilibrium. Motivated by recent progresses in ultracold atom experiments, we first analyze transport phenomena of a population imbalanced two-component fermi gas with arbitrary strength of inter-species interaction in three dimension. Using the Boltzmann kinetic equation at dilute regime, we obtain the transport coefficients of linear responses to gradients of temperature and chemical potential imbalance. We identify the magneto-caloric effects, and determine how these effects depend on interaction strength and population imbalance. Then, we propose an experimental protocol to observe these effects in an experiment with ultracold atoms. Next, we study entanglement spreading in a one-dimensional quantum Ising chain with longitudinal and transverse fields, which is diffusive and nonintegrable. Fully diagonalizing the Hamiltonian matrix, we explicitly show that the entanglement spreading is ballistic, thus faster than diffusive transport of conserved quantities. We provide a local spreading picture of entanglement entropy in terms of logarithmic negativity. Then, we discuss a role of energy conservation in entanglement spreading

through analyzing a Floquet system. Lastly, we construct local operators that relax slowly to equilibrium with the same one-dimensional Hamiltonian. By showing that the Hamiltonian satisfies the eigenstate thermalization hypothesis, we first conclude that this model relaxes local operators to thermal equilibrium. Then, we systematically construct local operators that relax slower than conventional diffusive modes.