Fine structures in the spectrum of the open-boundary Heisenberg chain at large anisotropies

At large anisotropies, the spectrum of the Heisenberg XXZ spin chain separates into `bands' with energies largely determined by the number of domain walls. The band structure is richer with open boundary conditions: there are more bands and the bands develop intricate fine structures. We characterize and explain these structures and substructures in the open-boundary chain. The fine structures are explained using degenerate perturbation theory. We also present some dynamical consequences of these sub-band structures, through explicit time evolution of the wavefunction from initial states motivated by the fine structure analysis

Avalanches and hysteresis in frustrated superconductors and XY-spin-glasses

We study avalanches along the hysteresis loop of long-range interacting spin-glasses with continuous XY-symmetry - which serves as a toy model of granular superconductors with long-range and frustrated Josephson couplings. We identify sudden jumps in the $T=0$ configurations of the XY-phases, as an external field is increased. They are initiated by the softest mode of the inverse susceptibility matrix becoming unstable, which induces an avalanche of phase updates (or spin alignments). We analyze the statistics of these events, and study the correlation between the non-linear avalanches and the soft mode that initiates them. We find that the avalanches follow the directions of a small fraction of the softest modes of the inverse susceptibility matrix, similarly as was found in avalanches in jammed systems. In contrast to the similar Ising spin-glass (Sherrington-Kirkpatrick) studied previously, we find that avalanches are not distributed with a scale-free power law, but rather have a typical size which scales with the system size. We also observe that the Hessians of the spin-glass minima are not part of standard random matrix ensembles as the lowest eigenvector has a fractal support.Comment: 17 pages, 12 figure

Persistent entanglement in a class of eigenstates of quantum Heisenberg spin glasses

The eigenstates of a quantum spin glass Hamiltonian with long-range interaction are examined from the point of view of localisation and entanglement. In particular, low particle sectors are examined and an anomalous family of eigenstates is found that is more delocalised but also has larger inter-spin entanglement. These are then identified as particle-added eigenstates from the one-particle sector. This motivates the introduction and the study of random promoted two-particle states, and it is shown that they may have large delocalisation such as generic ran- dom states and scale exactly like them. However, the entanglement as measured by two-spin concurrence displays different scaling with the total number of spins. This shows how for different classes of complex quantum states entanglement can be qualitatively different even if localisation measures such as participation ratio are not.Comment: 7 pages, 3 figures, 1 tabl

The microscopic origin of thermodynamic entropy in isolated systems

A microscopic understanding of the thermodynamic entropy in quantum systems has been a mystery ever since the invention of quantum mechanics. In classical physics, this entropy is believed to be the logarithm of the volume of phase space accessible to an isolated system [1]. There is no quantum mechanical analog to this. Instead, Von Neumann's hypothesis for the entropy [2] is most widely used. However this gives zero for systems with a known wave function, that is a pure state. This is because it measures the lack of information about the system rather than the flow of heat as obtained from thermodynamic experiments. Many arguments attempt to sidestep these issues by considering the system of interest coupled to a large external one, unlike the classical case where Boltzmann's approach for isolated systems is far more satisfactory. With new experimental techniques, probing the quantum nature of thermalization is now possible [3, 4]. Here, using recent advances in our understanding of quantum thermalization [5-10] we show how to obtain the entropy as is measured from thermodynamic experiments, solely from the self-entanglement of the wavefunction, and find strong numerical evidence that the two are in agreement for non-integrable systems. It is striking that this entropy, which is closely related to the concept of heat, and generally thought of as microscopic chaotic motion, can be determined for systems in energy eigenstates which are stationary in time and therefore not chaotic, but instead have a very complex spatial dependence.Comment: Manuscript is 5 pages, 2 figures, plus supplementary materials of 8 pages and 5 figure