We study the relaxation of the Holstein model after a sudden switch-on of the interaction by means of the nonequilibrium dynamical mean field theory, with the self-consistent Migdal approximation as an impurity solver. We show that there exists a qualitative change in the thermalization dynamics as the interaction is varied in the weak-coupling regime. On the weaker interaction side of this crossover, the phonon oscillations are damped more rapidly than the electron thermalization timescale, as determined from the relaxation of the electron momentum distribution function. On the stronger interaction side, the relaxation of the electrons becomes faster than the phonon damping. In this regime, despite long-lived phonon oscillations, a thermalized momentum distribution is realized temporarily. The origin of the thermalization crossover found here is traced back to different behaviors of the electron and phonon self-energies as a function of the electron-phonon coupling. In addition, the importance of the phonon dynamics is demonstrated by comparing the self-consistent Migdal results with those obtained with a simpler Hatree-Fock impurity solver that neglects the phonon self-energy. The latter scheme does not properly describe the evolution and thermalization of isolated electron-phonon systems.
We study quenches of the interaction and electron-phonon coupling parameter in the Hubbard-Holstein model, using nonequilibrium dynamical mean field theory. The calculations are based on a generalized Lang-Firsov scheme for time-dependent interactions or externally driven phonons, and an approximate strong-coupling impurity solver. The interaction quench calculations reveal the phonon-assisted decay of excess doublons, while the quenches of the electron-phonon coupling lead to persistent oscillations of the phonons and to a phonon-enhanced doublon production.
The eigenstate thermalization hypothesis (ETH) is a successful theory that provides sufficient criteria for ergodicity in quantum many-body systems. Most studies were carried out for Hamiltonians relevant for ultracold quantum gases and single-component systems of spins, fermions, or bosons. The paradigmatic example for thermalization in solid-state physics are phonons serving as a bath for electrons. This situation is often viewed from an open-quantum system perspective. Here, we ask whether a minimal microscopic model for electron-phonon coupling is quantum chaotic and whether it obeys ETH, …
The dynamics of interacting bosons in one dimension following the sudden switching on of a weak disordered potential is investigated. On time scales before quasiparticles scatter (prethermalized regime), the dephasing from random elastic forward scattering causes all correlations to decay exponentially fast, but the system remains far from thermal equilibrium. For longer times, the combined effect of disorder and interactions gives rise to inelastic scattering and to thermalization. A novel quantum kinetic equation accounting for both disorder and interactions is employed to study the dynamics…
We study the time evolution of a half-filled Hubbard layer coupled to a magnon bath after a quench of the Hubbard interaction. Qualitatively different regimes, regarding the asymptotic long-time dynamics, are identified and characterized within the mean-field approximation. In the absence of the bath, the dynamics of the closed system is similar to that of a quenched BCS condensate. Though the presence of the bath introduces an additional relaxation mechanism, our numerical results and analytical arguments show that equilibration with the bath is not necessarily attained within the approximati…
We study the nonequilibrium dynamics of a one-dimensional topological Kondo insulator, modelled by a $p$-wave Anderson lattice model, following a quantum quench of the on-site interaction strength. Our goal is to examine how the quench influences the topological properties of the system, therefore our main focus is the time evolution of the string order parameter, entanglement spectrum and the topologically-protected edge states. We point out that postquench local observables can be well captured by a thermal ensemble up to a certain interaction strength. Our results demonstrate that the topol…
We study the thermalization, after sudden and slow quenches, of an interacting model having a quantum phase transition from a Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev (SYK) non-Fermi liquid (NFL) to a Fermi liquid (FL). The model has SYK fermions coupled to non-interacting lead fermions and can be realized in a graphene flake connected to external leads. After a sudden quench to the NFL, a thermal state is reached rapidly via collapse-revival oscillations of the quasiparticle residue of the lead fermions. In contrast, the quench to the FL, across the NFL-FL transition, leads to multiple prethermal regimes and much s…
In two spatial dimensions, topological order is robust for static deformations at zero temperature, while it is fragile at any finite temperature. How robust is topological order after a quantum quench? In this paper we show that topological order thermalizes under the unitary evolution after a quantum quench. If the quench preserves gauge symmetry, there is a residual topological entropy exactly like in the finite temperature case. We obtain this result by studying the time evolution of the topological 2-Rényi entropy in a fully analytical, exact way. These techniques can be then applied to s…
The dynamical interplay between electron-electron interactions and electron-phonon coupling is investigated within the Anderson-Holstein model, a minimal model for open quantum systems that embody these effects. The influence of phonons on spectral and transport properties is explored in equilibrium, for non-equilibrium steady state and for transient dynamics after a quench. Both the particle-hole symmetric and the more generic particle-hole asymmetric cases are studied. The treatment is based on two complementary non-crossing approximations, the first of which is constructed around the weak-c…
We investigate the mechanisms of control and suppression of pre-thermalization in $N$-component alkaline earth gases. To this end, we compute the short-time dynamics of the instantaneous momentum distribution and the relative population for different initial conditions after an interaction quench, accounting for the 11 peffect of initial interactions. We find that switching on an interaction that breaks the SU$(N)$ symmetry of the initial Hamiltonian, thus allowing for the occurrence of spin-changing collisions, does not necessarily lead to a suppression of pre-thermalization. However, the sup…
We study the non-equilibrium dynamics of a Luttinger liquid after a simultaneous quantum quench of the interaction and dissipative quench to the environment within the realm of the Lindblad equation. When the couplings to environment satisfy detailed balance, the system is destined to thermalize, which we follow using bosonization. The thermodynamic entropy of the system, which also encodes information about the entanglement with the environment, either exhibits a maximum and minimum or grows monotonically before reaching its thermal value in a universal fashion. The single-particle density ma…
Although most studies of strongly correlated systems away from equilibrium have focused on clean systems, it is well known that disorder may significantly modify observed properties in various nontrivial ways. The nonequilibrium interplay of interaction and disorder in these systems thus requires further investigation. In the present paper, we use the recently developed nonequilibrium DMFT+CPA embedding scheme, that combines both the dynamical mean field theory (DMFT) and the coherent potential approximation (CPA) nonequilibrium extensions, to characterize the relaxation and the thermalization…
We study thermalization in the holographic (1+1)-dimensional CFT after simultaneous generation of two high-energy excitations in the antipodal points on the circle. The holographic picture of such quantum quench is the creation of BTZ black hole from a collision of two massless particles. We perform holographic computation of entanglement entropy and mutual information in the boundary theory and analyze their evolution with time. We show that equilibration of the entanglement in the regions which contained one of the initial excitations is generally similar to that in other holographic quench …
Synthetic horizons in models for quantum matter provide an alternative route to explore fundamental questions of modern gravitational theory. Here, we apply these concepts to the problem of emergence of thermal quantum states in the presence of a horizon, by studying ground-state thermalization due to instantaneous horizon creation in a gravitational setting and its condensed matter analogue. By a sudden quench to position-dependent hopping amplitudes in a one-dimensional lattice model, we establish the emergence of a thermal state accompanying the formation of a synthetic horizon. The resulti…
We describe the non-equilibrium dynamics of the Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev models of fermions with all-to-all interactions. These provide tractable models of the dynamics of quantum systems without quasiparticle excitations. The Kadanoff-Baym equations show that the final state is thermal, and their numerical analysis appears consistent with a thermalization rate proportional to the absolute temperature of the final state. We also obtain an exact analytic solution of the non-equilibrium dynamics in the large $q$ limit of a model with $q$ fermion interactions: in this limit, the thermalization of the fe…
Motivated by recent experiments in ultracold atomic gases that explore the nonequilibrium dynamics of interacting quantum many-body systems, we investigate the opposite limit of Landau's Fermi liquid paradigm: We study a Hubbard model with a sudden interaction quench, that is the interaction is switched on at time t=0. Using the flow equation method, we are able to study the real time dynamics for weak interaction U in a systematic expansion and find three clearly separated time regimes: i) An initial buildup of correlations where the quasiparticles are formed. ii) An intermediate quasi-steady…
We study the role of dipolar interactions in the standard protocol used to achieve dynamic nuclear polarization (DNP). In the so-called spin-temperature regime, where the interactions establish an effective thermodynamic behavior in the out-of-equilibrium stationary state, we provide numerical predictions for the level of hyperpolarization. We show that nuclear spins equilibrate to the effective spin-temperature established among the electron spins of radicals, as expected from the quantum theory of thermalization. Moreover, we present an analytical technique to estimate the spin temperature, …
We study the quantum dynamics of small polaron formation and polaron transport through finite quantum structures in the framework of the one-dimensional Holstein model with site-dependent potentials and interactions. Combining Lanczos diagonalization with Chebyshev moment expansion of the time evolution operator, we determine how different initial states, representing stationary ground states or injected wave packets, after an electron-phonon interaction quench, develop in real space and time. Thereby, the full quantum nature and dynamics of electrons and phonons is preserved. We find that the…
We investigate the non-equilibrium states of an interacting multi-component quantum system when only an extensive subsystem is quantum-quenched or driven from the ground state. As a concrete example, we consider a system where two XXZ spin chains are coupled to a transverse field Ising (TFI) chain, and only the transverse field in the TFI chain is quantum-quenched or periodically driven in time, starting from an initially ordered state. This system is studied using density matrix renormalization group (DMRG) simulations and various entanglement entropy diagnostics. In the case of quantum quenc…
In weakly perturbed systems that are close to integrability, thermalization can be delayed by the formation of prethermalization plateaus. We study the build-up of density-density correlations after a weak interaction quench in the Hubbard model in $d > 1$ dimensions using unitary perturbation theory. Starting from a pre-quench state at temperature $T$, we show that the prethermalization values of the post-quench correlations are equal to the equilibrium values of the interacting model at the same temperature $T$. This is explained by the local character of density-density correlations.
After a sudden disruption, weakly interacting quantum systems first relax to a prethermalized state that can be described by perturbation theory and a generalized Gibbs ensemble. Using these properties of the prethermalized state we perturbatively derive a kinetic equation which becomes a quantum Boltzmann equation in the scaling limit of vanishing interaction. Applying this to interaction quenches in the fermionic Hubbard model we find that the momentum distribution relaxes to the thermal prediction of statistical mechanics. For not too large interaction, this two-stage scenario provides a qu…
We review exact approaches and recent results related to the relaxation dynamics and description after relaxation of various one-dimensional lattice systems of hard-core bosons after a sudden quench. We first analyze the integrable case, where the combination of analytical insights and computational techniques enable one to study large system sizes. Thermalization does not occur in this regime. However, after relaxation, observables can be described by a generalization of the Gibbs ensemble. We then utilize full exact diagonalization to study what happens as integrability is broken. We show th…
We study thermalization in a one-dimensional quantum system consisting of a noninteracting fermionic chain with each site of the chain coupled to an additional bath site. Using a density matrix renormalization group algorithm we investigate the time evolution of observables in the chain after a quantum quench. For low densities we show that the intermediate time dynamics can be quantitatively described by a system of coupled equations of motion. For higher densities our numerical results show a prethermalization for local observables at intermediate times and a full thermalization to the grand…
