| March 06, 14:00

Moving Impurities & Quantum Sonic Bangs

Alvise Bastianello

It is a well-known fact that the spreading of information in lattice quantum systems is not instantaneous, but it rather exists a maximum velocity dictated by the Lieb-Robinson bound. The existence of such a lightcone deeply affects equilibrium properties as well as out-of-equilibrium ones, which have been a subject of outstanding interest in the recent years. In this talk, a novel out-of-equilibrium protocol critically affected by the presence of a maximum velocity is proposed and discussed. Specifically, a one dimensional lattice model is considered, where a localized impurity is suddenly created and then dragged at a constant velocity. Focussing on a simple, but far from trivial, free model the response of the system at late times is analyzed, with emphasis on its transport properties. The finite maximum velocity is responsible for a rich phenomenology, for which exact results are provided. Taking into account the experience acquired so far, more general models are discussed and unpublished results presented, with exact predictions in completely generic (non integrable) one dimensional lattice systems. Reference paper: A. Bastianello, A. De Luca, Phys. Rev. Lett. 120, 060602 (2018).


SISSA, Trieste
Seminar room 0.02, ETP
Contact: Sebastian Diehl