Edge Singularities and Quasilong-Range Order in Nonequilibrium Steady States

Emergence of Hydrodynamic Spatial Long-Range Correlations in Nonequilibrium Many-Body Systems

At large scales of space and time, the nonequilibrium dynamics of local observables in extensive many-body systems is well described by hydrodynamics. At the Euler scale, one assumes that each mesoscopic region independently reaches a state of maximal entropy under the constraints given by the available conservation laws. Away from phase transitions, maximal entropy states show exponential correlation decay, and independence of fluid cells might be assumed to subsist during the course of time evolution. We show that this picture is incorrect: under ballistic scaling, regions separated by macroscopic distances "develop long-range correlations as time passes." These correlations take a universal form that only depends on the Euler hydrodynamics of the model. They are rooted in the large-scale motion of interacting fluid modes and are the dominant long-range correlations developing in time from long-wavelength, entropy-maximized states. They require "the presence of interaction" and "at least two different fluid modes" and are of a fundamentally different nature from well-known long-range correlations occurring from diffusive spreading or from quasiparticle excitations produced in far-from-equilibrium quenches. We provide a universal theoretical framework to exactly evaluate them, an adaptation of the macroscopic fluctuation theory to the Euler scale. We verify our exact predictions in the hard-rod gas, by comparing with numerical simulations and finding excellent agreement.

Relaxation of Phonons in the Lieb-Liniger Gas by Dynamical Refermionization

Motivated by recent experiments, we investigate the Lieb-Liniger gas initially prepared in an out-of-equilibrium state that is Gaussian in terms of the phonons, namely whose density matrix is the exponential of an operator quadratic in terms of phonon creation and annihilation operators. Because the phonons are not exact eigenstates of the Hamiltonian, the gas relaxes to a stationary state at very long times whose phonon population is a priori different from the initial one. Thanks to integrability, that stationary state needs not be a thermal state. Using the Bethe-ansatz mapping between the exact eigenstates of the Lieb-Liniger Hamiltonian and those of a noninteracting Fermi gas and bosonization techniques we completely characterize the stationary state of the gas after relaxation and compute its phonon population distribution. We apply our results to the case where the initial state is an excited coherent state for a single phonon mode, and we compare them to exact results obtained in the hard-core limit.

Breakdown of Tan's Relation in Lossy One-Dimensional Bose Gases

In quantum gases with contact repulsion, the distribution of momenta of the atoms typically decays as ∼1/|p|^{4} at large momentum p. Tan's relation connects the amplitude of that 1/|p|^{4} tail to the adiabatic derivative of the energy with respect to the coupling constant or scattering length of the gas. Here it is shown that the relation breaks down in the one-dimensional Bose gas with contact repulsion, for a peculiar class of stationary states. These states exist thanks to the infinite number of conserved quantities in the system, and they are characterized by a rapidity distribution that itself decreases as 1/|p|^{4}. In the momentum distribution, that rapidity tail adds to the usual Tan contact term. Remarkably, atom losses, which are ubiquitous in experiments, do produce such peculiar states. The development of the tail of the rapidity distribution originates from the ghost singularity of the wave function immediately after each loss event. This phenomenon is discussed for arbitrary interaction strengths, and it is supported by exact calculations in the two asymptotic regimes of infinite and weak repulsion.

Anomalous Spin Diffusion in One-Dimensional Antiferromagnets

The problem of characterizing low-temperature spin dynamics in antiferromagnetic spin chains has so far remained elusive. Here we reinvestigate it by focusing on isotropic antiferromagnetic chains whose low-energy effective field theory is governed by the quantum nonlinear sigma model. Employing an exact nonperturbative theoretical approach, we analyze the low-temperature behavior in the vicinity of nonmagnetized states and obtain exact expressions for the spin diffusion constant and the NMR relaxation rate, which we compare with previous theoretical results in the literature. Surprisingly, in SU(2)-invariant spin chains in the vicinity of half filling we find a crossover from the semiclassical regime to a strongly interacting quantum regime characterized by zero spin Drude weight and diverging spin conductivity, indicating superdiffusive spin dynamics. The dynamical exponent of spin fluctuations is argued to belong to the Kardar-Parisi-Zhang universality class. Furthermore, by employing numerical time-dependent density matrix renormalization group simulations, we find robust evidence that the anomalous spin transport persists also at high temperatures, irrespective of the spectral gap and integrability of the model.

Integrability-Protected Adiabatic Reversibility in Quantum Spin Chains

We consider the out-of-equilibrium dynamics of the Heisenberg anisotropic quantum spin-1/2 chain threaded by a time-dependent magnetic flux. In the spirit of the recently developed generalized hydrodynamics (GHD), we exploit the integrability of the model for any flux values to derive an exact description of the dynamics in the limit of slowly varying flux: the state of the system is described at any time by a time-dependent generalized Gibbs ensemble. Two dynamical regimes emerge according to the value of the anisotropy Δ. For |Δ|>1, reversibility is preserved: the initial state is always recovered whenever the flux is brought back to zero. On the contrary, for |Δ|<1, instabilities of quasiparticles produce irreversible dynamics as confirmed by the dramatic growth of entanglement entropy. In this regime, the standard GHD description becomes incomplete and we complement it via a maximum entropy production principle. We test our predictions against numerical simulations finding excellent agreement.

Hydrodynamic Diffusion in Integrable Systems

We show that hydrodynamic diffusion is generically present in many-body, one-dimensional interacting quantum and classical integrable models. We extend the recently developed generalized hydrodynamic (GHD) to include terms of Navier-Stokes type, which leads to positive entropy production and diffusive relaxation mechanisms. These terms provide the subleading diffusive corrections to Euler-scale GHD for the large-scale nonequilibrium dynamics of integrable systems, and arise due to two-body scatterings among quasiparticles. We give exact expressions for the diffusion coefficients. Our results apply to a large class of integrable models, including quantum and classical, Galilean and relativistic field theories, chains, and gases in one dimension, such as the Lieb-Liniger model describing cold atom gases and the Heisenberg quantum spin chain. We provide numerical evaluations in the Heisenberg XXZ spin chain, both for the spin diffusion constant, and for the diffusive effects during the melting of a small domain wall of spins, finding excellent agreement with time-dependent density matrix renormalization group numerical simulations.