Quasilocal charges and progress towards the complete GGE for field theories with nondiagonal scattering

Abstract

It has recently been shown that some integrable spin chains possess a set of quasilocal conserved charges, with the classic example being the spin- XXZ Heisenberg chain. These charges have been proven to be essential in order to properly describe stationary states after a quantum quench, and must be included in the generalized Gibbs ensemble (GGE). We find that similar charges are also necessary for the GGE description of integrable quantum field theories with nondiagonal scattering. A stationary state in a nondiagonal scattering theory is completely specified by fixing the mode-occupation density distributions of physical particles, as well auxiliary particles which carry no energy or momentum. We show that the set of conserved charges with integer Lorentz spin, related to the integrability of the model, is unable to fix the distributions of these auxiliary particles, since these charges can only fix the kinematical properties of physical particles. The field theory analogs of the quasilocal lattice charges are therefore necessary. As a concrete example, we find the complete set of charges needed in the sine-Gordon model, by using the fact that this field theory is recovered as the continuum limit of a spatially inhomogeneous version of the XXZ chain. The set of quasilocal charges of the lattice theory is shown to become a set of local charges with fractional spin in the field theory.