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Universal front propagation in the quantum Ising chain with domain-wall initial states
by Viktor Eisler, Florian Maislinger, Hans Gerd Evertz
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Submission summary
| Authors (as registered SciPost users): | Viktor Eisler |
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| Preprint Link: | http://arxiv.org/abs/1610.01540v3 (pdf) |
| Date accepted: | 2016-12-22 |
| Date submitted: | 2016-12-09 01:00 |
| Submitted by: | Eisler, Viktor |
| Submitted to: | SciPost Physics |
| Ontological classification | |
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| Academic field: | Physics |
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| Approach: | Theoretical |
Abstract
We study the melting of domain walls in the ferromagnetic phase of the transverse Ising chain, created by flipping the order-parameter spins along one-half of the chain. If the initial state is excited by a local operator in terms of Jordan-Wigner fermions, the resulting longitudinal magnetization profiles have a universal character. Namely, after proper rescalings, the profiles in the noncritical Ising chain become identical to those obtained for a critical free-fermion chain starting from a step-like initial state. The relation holds exactly in the entire ferromagnetic phase of the Ising chain and can even be extended to the zero-field XY model by a duality argument. In contrast, for domain-wall excitations that are highly non-local in the fermionic variables, the universality of the magnetization profiles is lost. Nevertheless, for both cases we observe that the entanglement entropy asymptotically saturates at the ground-state value, suggesting a simple form of the steady state.
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Published as SciPost Phys. 1, 014 (2016)