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 systems with strong disorder to show whether a many-body localization phenomenon appears in topologically ordered systems.
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 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 …
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…
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 dynamics and thermalization of strongly correlated fermions in finite one-dimensional lattices after a quantum quench. Our calculations are performed using exact diagonalization. We focus on one- and two-body observables such as the momentum distribution function [n(k)] and the density-density structure factor [N(k)], respectively, and study the effects of approaching an integrable point. We show that while the relaxation dynamics and thermalization of N(k) for fermions is very similar to the one of hardcore bosons, the behavior of n(k) is distinctively different. The latter obser…
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 inter…
We study the expectation values of observables and correlation functions at long times after a global quantum quench. Our focus is on metallic (`gapless') fermionic many-body models and small quenches. The system is prepared in an eigenstate of an initial Hamiltonian, and the time evolution is performed with a final Hamiltonian which differs from the initial one in the value of one global parameter. We first derive general relations between time-averaged expectation values of observables as well as correlation functions and those obtained in an eigenstate of the final Hamiltonian. Our results …
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…
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…
There is much interest in how quantum systems thermalize after a sudden change, because unitary evolution should preclude thermalization. The eigenstate thermalization hypothesis resolves this because all observables for quantum states in a small energy window have essentially the same value; it is violated for integrable systems due to the infinite number of conserved quantities. Here, we show that when a system is driven by a DC electric field there are five generic behaviors: (i) monotonic or (ii) oscillatory approach to an infinite-temperature steady state; (iii) monotonic or (iv) oscillat…
We excite the vacuum of a relativistic theory of bosons coupled to a $U(1)$ gauge field in 1+1 dimensions (bosonic Schwinger model) out of equilibrium by creating a spatially separated particle-antiparticle pair connected by a string of electric field. During the evolution, we observe a strong confinement of bosons witnessed by the bending of their light cone, reminiscent of what has been observed for the Ising model [Nat. Phys. 13, 246 (2017)]. As a consequence, for the time scales we are able to simulate, the system evades thermalization and generates exotic asymptotic states. These states a…
In his Comment [see preceding Comment, Phys. Rev. A 82, 037601 (2010)] on the paper by Roux [Phys. Rev. A 79, 021608(R) (2009)], Rigol argued that the energy distribution after a quench is not related to standard statistical ensembles and cannot explain thermalization. The latter is proposed to stem from what he calls the eigenstate thermalization hypothesis and which boils down to the fact that simple observables are expected to be smooth functions of the energy. In this Reply, we show that there is no contradiction or confusion between the observations and discussions of Roux and the expecte…
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…
Topological ordered states are exotic quantum states of matter that defy the usual description in terms of symmetry breaking and local order parameters. The type or order they feature is of non-local, topological nature, and it allows such systems to present unusual and interesting behaviours, like robust degeneracy, and anyonic excitations. Here we focus on the behaviour of such systems away from equilibrium. After a sudden change of the Hamiltonian - the so called quantum quench - quantum many body systems show thermalization, unless the quench is integrable. We show how in topologically ord…
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…
We investigate a weak version of subsystem eigenstate thermalization hypothesis (ETH) for a two-dimensional large central charge conformal field theory by comparing the local equivalence of high energy state and thermal state of canonical ensemble. We evaluate the single-interval Rényi entropy and entanglement entropy for a heavy primary state in short interval expansion. We verify the results of Rényi entropy by two different replica methods. We find nontrivial results at the eighth order of short interval expansion, which include an infinite number of higher order terms in the large central …
The Quantum Null Energy Condition (QNEC) relates energy to the second variation of entropy in relativistic quantum field theory. We use the QNEC inequality to bound entanglement entropy in quenches. At early times the entanglement entropy grows quadratically in time, and the QNEC provides an upper bound on the prefactor. We demonstrate that the bound is tight, by showing that it is saturated in certain quench protocols: boundary state quenches in conformal field theories in any dimensions. In higher than two dimensions we compute entanglement entropy using AdS/CFT. Our results are the first pu…
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…
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…
We study the dynamics of thermalization following a quantum quench using tensor-network methods. Contrary to the common belief that the rapid growth of entanglement and the resulting exponential growth of the bond dimension restricts simulations to short times, we demonstrate that the long time limit of local observables can be well captured using the time-dependent variational principle. This allows to extract transport coefficients such as the energy diffusion constant from simulations with rather small bond dimensions. We further study the characteristic of the chaotic wave that precedes th…
This review gives a pedagogical introduction to the eigenstate thermalization hypothesis (ETH), its basis, and its implications to statistical mechanics and thermodynamics. In the first part, ETH is introduced as a natural extension of ideas from quantum chaos and random matrix theory (RMT). To this end, we present a brief overview of classical and quantum chaos, as well as RMT and some of its most important predictions. The latter include the statistics of energy levels, eigenstate components, and matrix elements of observables. Building on these, we introduce the ETH and show that it allows …
Entanglement is usually quantified by von Neumann entropy, but its properties are much more complex than what can be expressed with a single number. We show that the three distinct dynamical phases known as thermalization, Anderson localization, and many-body localization are marked by different patterns of the spectrum of the reduced density matrix for a state evolved after a quantum quench. While the entanglement spectrum displays Poisson statistics for the case of Anderson localization, it displays universal Wigner-Dyson statistics for both the cases of many-body localization and thermaliza…
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.
We study the growth of entanglement entropy in density matrix renormalization group calculations of the real-time quench dynamics of the Anderson impurity model. We find that with appropriate choice of basis, the entropy growth is logarithmic in both the interacting and noninteracting single-impurity models. The logarithmic entropy growth is understood from a noninteracting chain model as a critical behavior separating regimes of linear growth and saturation of entropy, corresponding respectively to an overlapping and gapped energy spectra of the set of bath states. We find that with an approp…
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…
