9,984 research outputs found
Geometrical optics analysis of the short-time stability properties of the Einstein evolution equations
Many alternative formulations of Einstein's evolution have lately been
examined, in an effort to discover one which yields slow growth of
constraint-violating errors. In this paper, rather than directly search for
well-behaved formulations, we instead develop analytic tools to discover which
formulations are particularly ill-behaved. Specifically, we examine the growth
of approximate (geometric-optics) solutions, studied only in the future domain
of dependence of the initial data slice (e.g. we study transients). By
evaluating the amplification of transients a given formulation will produce, we
may therefore eliminate from consideration the most pathological formulations
(e.g. those with numerically-unacceptable amplification). This technique has
the potential to provide surprisingly tight constraints on the set of
formulations one can safely apply. To illustrate the application of these
techniques to practical examples, we apply our technique to the 2-parameter
family of evolution equations proposed by Kidder, Scheel, and Teukolsky,
focusing in particular on flat space (in Rindler coordinates) and Schwarzchild
(in Painleve-Gullstrand coordinates).Comment: Submitted to Phys. Rev.
Observations Outside the Light-Cone: Algorithms for Non-Equilibrium and Thermal States
We apply algorithms based on Lieb-Robinson bounds to simulate time-dependent
and thermal quantities in quantum systems. For time-dependent systems, we
modify a previous mapping to quantum circuits to significantly reduce the
computer resources required. This modification is based on a principle of
"observing" the system outside the light-cone. We apply this method to study
spin relaxation in systems started out of equilibrium with initial conditions
that give rise to very rapid entanglement growth. We also show that it is
possible to approximate time evolution under a local Hamiltonian by a quantum
circuit whose light-cone naturally matches the Lieb-Robinson velocity.
Asymptotically, these modified methods allow a doubling of the system size that
one can obtain compared to direct simulation. We then consider a different
problem of thermal properties of disordered spin chains and use quantum belief
propagation to average over different configurations. We test this algorithm on
one dimensional systems with mixed ferromagnetic and anti-ferromagnetic bonds,
where we can compare to quantum Monte Carlo, and then we apply it to the study
of disordered, frustrated spin systems.Comment: 19 pages, 12 figure
The role of initial conditions in the ageing of the long-range spherical model
The kinetics of the long-range spherical model evolving from various initial
states is studied. In particular, the large-time auto-correlation and -response
functions are obtained, for classes of long-range correlated initial states,
and for magnetized initial states. The ageing exponents can depend on certain
qualitative features of initial states. We explicitly find the conditions for
the system to cross over from ageing classes that depend on initial conditions
to those that do not.Comment: 15 pages; corrected some typo
Entanglement entropy of two disjoint intervals in conformal field theory
We study the entanglement of two disjoint intervals in the conformal field
theory of the Luttinger liquid (free compactified boson). Tr\rho_A^n for any
integer n is calculated as the four-point function of a particular type of
twist fields and the final result is expressed in a compact form in terms of
the Riemann-Siegel theta functions. In the decompactification limit we provide
the analytic continuation valid for all model parameters and from this we
extract the entanglement entropy. These predictions are checked against
existing numerical data.Comment: 34 pages, 7 figures. V2: Results for small x behavior added, typos
corrected and refs adde
Entanglement entropy of random quantum critical points in one dimension
For quantum critical spin chains without disorder, it is known that the
entanglement of a segment of N>>1 spins with the remainder is logarithmic in N
with a prefactor fixed by the central charge of the associated conformal field
theory. We show that for a class of strongly random quantum spin chains, the
same logarithmic scaling holds for mean entanglement at criticality and defines
a critical entropy equivalent to central charge in the pure case. This
effective central charge is obtained for Heisenberg, XX, and quantum Ising
chains using an analytic real-space renormalization group approach believed to
be asymptotically exact. For these random chains, the effective universal
central charge is characteristic of a universality class and is consistent with
a c-theorem.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figure
On entanglement evolution across defects in critical chains
We consider a local quench where two free-fermion half-chains are coupled via
a defect. We show that the logarithmic increase of the entanglement entropy is
governed by the same effective central charge which appears in the ground-state
properties and which is known exactly. For unequal initial filling of the
half-chains, we determine the linear increase of the entanglement entropy.Comment: 11 pages, 5 figures, minor changes, reference adde
The Ubiquitous 'c': from the Stefan-Boltzmann Law to Quantum Information
I discuss various aspects of the role of the conformal anomaly number c in 2-
and 1+1-dimensional critical behaviour: its appearance as the analogue of
Stefan's constant, its fundamental role in conformal field theory, in the
classification of 2d universality classes, and as a measure of quantum
entanglement, among other topics.Comment: 8 pages, 2 figures. Boltzmann Medal Lecture, Statphys24, Cairns 2010.
v3: minor revision
Correlations in an expanding gas of hard-core bosons
We consider a longitudinal expansion of a one-dimensional gas of hard-core
bosons suddenly released from a trap. We show that the broken translational
invariance in the initial state of the system is encoded in correlations
between the bosonic occupation numbers in the momentum space. The correlations
are protected by the integrability and exhibit no relaxation during the
expansion
Entanglement entropy of two disjoint intervals in c=1 theories
We study the scaling of the Renyi entanglement entropy of two disjoint blocks
of critical lattice models described by conformal field theories with central
charge c=1. We provide the analytic conformal field theory result for the
second order Renyi entropy for a free boson compactified on an orbifold
describing the scaling limit of the Ashkin-Teller (AT) model on the self-dual
line. We have checked this prediction in cluster Monte Carlo simulations of the
classical two dimensional AT model. We have also performed extensive numerical
simulations of the anisotropic Heisenberg quantum spin-chain with tree-tensor
network techniques that allowed to obtain the reduced density matrices of
disjoint blocks of the spin-chain and to check the correctness of the
predictions for Renyi and entanglement entropies from conformal field theory.
In order to match these predictions, we have extrapolated the numerical results
by properly taking into account the corrections induced by the finite length of
the blocks to the leading scaling behavior.Comment: 37 pages, 23 figure
Entanglement Dynamics after a Quench in Ising Field Theory: A Branch Point Twist Field Approach
We extend the branch point twist field approach for the calculation of entanglement entropies to time-dependent problems in 1+1-dimensional massive quantum field theories. We focus on the simplest example: a mass quench in the Ising field theory from initial mass m0 to final mass m. The main analytical results are obtained from a perturbative expansion of the twist field one-point function in the post-quench quasi-particle basis. The expected linear growth of the Rényi entropies at large times mt ≫ 1 emerges from a perturbative calculation at second order. We also show that the Rényi and von Neumann entropies, in infinite volume, contain subleading oscillatory contributions of frequency 2m and amplitude proportional to (mt)−3/2. The oscillatory terms are correctly predicted by an alternative perturbation series, in the pre-quench quasi-particle basis, which we also discuss. A comparison to lattice numerical calculations carried out on an Ising chain in the scaling limit shows very good agreement with the quantum field theory predictions. We also find evidence of clustering of twist field correlators which implies that the entanglement entropies are proportional to the number of subsystem boundary points
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