Abstract
In this work, we introduce an approach to study quantum many-body dynamics, inspired by the Feynman-Vernon influence functional. Focusing on a family of interacting, Floquet spin chains, we consider a Keldysh path-integral description of the dynamics. The central object in our approach is the influence matrix (IM), which describes the effect of the system on the dynamics of a local subsystem. For translationally invariant models, we formulate a self-consistency equation for the influence matrix. For certain special values of the model parameters, we obtain an exact solution which represents a perfect dephaser (PD). Physically, a PD corresponds to a many-body system that acts as a perfectly Markovian bath on itself: at each period, it measures every spin. For the models considered here, we establish that PD points include dual-unitary circuits investigated in recent works. In the vicinity of PD points, the system is not perfectly Markovian, but rather acts as a bath with a short memory time. In this case, we demonstrate that the self-consistency equation can be solved using matrix-product states (MPS) methods, as the IM temporal entanglement is low. A combination of analytical insights and MPS computations allows us to characterize the structure of the influence matrix in terms of an effective "statistical-mechanics" description. We finally illustrate the predictive power of this description by analytically computing how quickly an embedded impurity spin thermalizes. The influence matrix approach formulated here provides an intuitive view of the quantum many-body dynamics problem, opening a path to constructing models of thermalizing dynamics that are solvable or can be efficiently treated by MPS-based methods, and to further characterizing quantum ergodicity or lack thereof.
Highlights
Describing nonequilibrium quantum matter and harnessing it for quantum technology is one of the central challenges in modern physics
To characterize the structure of influence matrix (IM) in ergodic systems detuned away from perfect dephaser (PD) points, we adopt a statisticalmechanics-like description, viewing “quantum” intervals of a spin trajectory as “particles.” We study the weights of these particles and their interactions, demonstrating that in thermalizing systems they decay with their temporal distance
We emphasize that here our goal is to demonstrate that the IM approach allows one to construct examples of perfect dephasers, rather than to provide a complete classification of such solvable cases; this is left for future work
Summary
Describing nonequilibrium quantum matter and harnessing it for quantum technology is one of the central challenges in modern physics. We further find that away from PD points, the IM wave function exhibits slow growth of temporal entanglement, which allows us to analyze the system’s dynamics at longer times than those accessible via exact diagonalization This observation provides a tool for identifying regimes of thermalizing Floquet dynamics that are amenable to efficient MPS-based methods. The influence matrix approach has several additional attractive features Perhaps most importantly, it provides a direct, physically intuitive way to describe a many-body system as a quantum bath for its constituent parts, giving access to relevant timescales and various correlation functions, including the Loschmidt echo (see below).
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