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Abstract:

During the last decade a host of experiments has established the existence of highly unconventional states of matter in a variety of low dimensional quantum systems. These include equilibrium states characterized by topological properties as well as stationary states in out of equilibrium situations. Both of these give access to hitherto unexplored areas of many-body quantum physics. The key aim of the workshop was to bring together experts in several different research areas revolving around novel quantum states of matter.

Abstract:

We consider the time evolution after quantum quenches in the spin-1/2 Heisenberg XXZ quantum spin chain with Ising-like anisotropy. The time evolution of short-distance spin-spin correlation functions is studied by numerical tensor network techniques for a variety of initial states, including Néel and Majumdar-Ghosh states and the ground state of the XXZ chain at large values of the anisotropy. The various correlators appear to approach stationary values, which are found to be in good agreement with the results of exact calculations of stationary expectation values in appropriate generalized Gibbs ensembles. In particular, our analysis shows how symmetries of the post-quench Hamiltonian that are broken by particular initial states are restored at late times.

Abstract:

We consider quantum quenches in an integrable quantum chain with tuneable-integrability-breaking interactions. In the case where these interactions are weak, we demonstrate that at intermediate times after the quench local observables relax to a prethermalized regime, which can be described by a density matrix that can be viewed as a deformation of a generalized Gibbs ensemble. We present explicit expressions for the approximately conserved charges characterizing this ensemble. We do not find evidence for a crossover from the prethermalized to a thermalized regime on the time scales accessible to us. Increasing the integrability-breaking interactions leads to a behaviour that is compatible with eventual thermalization.