Quantum quench dynamics in the transverse field Ising model of fully connected spins

Abstract

The transverse field Ising model of N fully connected spins provides a mathematical accessible, yet non-trivial, system to investigate the non-thermal dynamics after a sudden quantum quench. The focus in this thesis is three-fold. First, in a 1/N expansion the dynamics of the mean magnetization within its variance is obtained analytically in the large N limit. The variance constitutes a leading order correction to the mean field limit at infinite N. While mean field theories are one of the most accessible approximations to deal with the quantum complexity, its validity in time out of equilibrium has to be checked on a case by case basis. By studying the dynamics of the variance, we see that the mean field approximation can break down at surprisingly early times scaling with the square root of N. The underlying mechanism in the fully connected Ising model is identified as a dephasing effect between nearby effective orbits. The dynamics of the magnetization variance discriminates four qualitatively different regions in the dynamical phase diagram that are indistinguishable by just looking at the mean magnetization. Second, bipartite entanglement between disjoint groups of the spins in the fully connected Ising model is studied. In the large N limit the entanglement Hamiltonian is shown to be a harmonic oscillator. A quantitative relation between the angular frequency of the oscillator and a squeezing measure of the spin state is derived. Explicit expressions for the Renyi entanglement entropies are given. In contrast to the variance, which vanishes in the thermodynamic limit, the entanglement entropy saturate to an N-independent positive value. The dynamics of the entanglement Hamiltonian and the entanglement entropies is discussed. Linear growth as a function of time is linked to the unstable fixed point and the homoclinic orbit of a pitchfork bifurcation, while logarithmic increase is explained due to a dephasing mechanism of nearby effective orbits. A generalization to other models that permit a semiclassical effective description (on a possibly higher dimensional phase space) is given. As a byproduct the connection between entangled Gaussian states and the symplectic eigenvalues of its reduced covariance is derived. An upper bound on the von Neumann entanglement entropy of any bipartite pure state is given in terms of the symplectic properties of its reduced covariance. Third, the existence of dynamical phase transitions (DPTs) in the fully connected Ising model is argued by two different approaches. DPTs are defined as non-analyticities in the time-dependence of the return probability rate function in the thermodynamic limit. Like entanglement entropy, the behavior of the return rate function is an observable-independent quantity used to characterize non-equilibrium states. A numerically based connection between the DPT and the analytic property of the infinite time averaged order parameter as a function of quench strength is discussed. The concept of Feynman history states is used to devise the notion of history entanglement. An information theoretic interpretation of the history entanglement entropy as the precision of a quantum clock follows from Holevo’s bound. The dependence of this entanglement entropy on the observation time constitutes an operator-independent characterization of the quantum dynamics in closed systems. For observation times comparable to the Heisenberg time, the history entanglement becomes sensitive to the statistics of the energy gaps, and thus distinguishes integrable and non-integrable dynamics. This is demonstrated for two examples, a random matrix ensemble, and a one-dimensional hardcore boson model with integrability breaking next nearest neighbor interaction.