It is known that relativistic wavefunctions formally propagate beyond the light cone when the propagator is limited to the positive energy sector. By construction, this is the case for solutions of the Salpeter (or relativistic Schrödinger) equation or for Klein-Gordon and Dirac wavefunctions defined in the Foldy-Wouthuysen representation. In this work we investigate quantitatively the degree of non-causality for free propagation for different types of wavepackets all having initially a compact spatial support. In the studied examples we find that non-causality appears as a small transient effect that can in most cases be neglected. We display several numerical results and discuss the fundamental and practical consequences of our findings concerning this peculiar dynamical feature.
The speed at which the magnetic interaction propagates along a chain of classic dipoles is discussed here. While in the quantum information counterpart for long-range interacting spins, where the speed of propagation of the information plays a paramount role, it is not strictly clear whether a light cone exists or not, here we provide numerical evidence that interacting dipoles do posses a linear light cone shortly after a perturbation takes place. Specifically, a power-law expansion occurs which is followed by a linear propagation of the associated interaction. As opposed to the quantum case,…
In this paper, we revisit a "relatively local" model proposed in arXiv:1811.07241, where locality and dimensionality of space only emerges from the entanglement structure of the state the system is in. Various quantities such as butterfly velocity/ entanglement speed can be defined similarly, at least in the regime where locality is well defined and a light cone structure emerges in the correlation between sites. We find that the relations observed between them in local models arXiv:1908.06993 are not respected. In particular, we conjecture that the hierarchy of the interaction over different …
As shown in Phys. Rev. A 96, 020101(R) (2017), it is possible to demonstrate that quantum particles do not move along straight lines in free space by increasing the probability of finding the particles within narrow intervals of position and momentum beyond the "either/or" limit of 0.5 using constructive quantum interference between a component localized in position and a component localized in momentum. The probability of finding the particle in a corresponding spatial interval at a later time then violates the lower bound of the particle propagation inequality which is based on the validity …
In this work, we investigate how quickly local perturbations propagate in interacting boson systems with Bose-Hubbard-type Hamiltonians. In general, these systems have unbounded local energies, and arbitrarily fast information propagation may occur. We focus on a specific but experimentally natural situation in which the number of bosons at any one site in the unperturbed initial state is approximately limited. We rigorously prove the existence of an almost-linear information-propagation light-cone, thus establishing a Lieb--Robinson bound: the wave-front grows at most as $t\log^2 (t)$. We pro…
We prove a maximal velocity bound for the dynamics of Markovian open quantum systems. The dynamics are described by one-parameter semi-groups of quantum channels satisfying the von Neumann-Lindblad equation. Our result says that dynamically evolving states are contained inside a suitable light cone up to polynomial errors. We also give a bound on the slope of the light cone, i.e., the maximal propagation speed. The result implies an upper bound on the speed of propagation of local perturbations of stationary states in open quantum systems.
We argue that chaotic power-law interacting systems have emergent limits on information propagation, analogous to relativistic light cones, which depend on the spatial dimension $d$ and the exponent $α$ governing the decay of interactions. Using the dephasing nature of quantum chaos, we map the problem to a stochastic model with a known phase diagram. A linear light cone results for $α\ge d+1/2$. We also provide a Lévy flight (long-range random walk) interpretation of the results and show consistent numerical data for 1d long-range spin models with 200 sites.
