Cluster mean-field dynamics of the long-range interacting Ising chain

In this thesis we study the dynamics of the long-range interacting Ising chain using a cluster mean-field approach, a mean-field theory that accounts for short range correlations. The principal result is that, if the system is isolated from an external environment, the model exhibits two different behaviors depending on the range of the interactions. Whenever the system is truly long-range, it exhibits a sharp mean-field dynamical phase transition from a dynamical ferromagnetic to a dynamical paramagnetic phase. Reducing the range of the interactions a critical region, showing hypersensitivity to initial conditions, appears. Interestingly, this chaotic region shares the same physics of a classical tossed coin that is allowed to bounce on the floor. In a second part of the work we derive the cluster mean-field equations of motion describing the dynamics of a fully connected Ising chain connected to an external bath. In particular we focused on the dynamics in presence of a dissipation generated by string of Glauber operators acting on one or more sites of the chain. This model, in presence of global dissipative processes, exhibits persistent oscillations in time revealing the existence of a boundary time-crystal and we studied the stability of the boundary time-crystal showing that global dissipative processes are a key ingredient for their existence

The Ising critical quantum Otto engine

We study a four-stroke Otto engine whose working fluid is a quantum Ising chain. The thermodynamic cycle consists in sweeps of the transverse magnetic field occurring in thermal isolation, alternated by thermalisation strokes with reservoirs at different temperatures. The system-environment coupling is modelled in a thermodynamically consistent way by means of a nonlocal Lindblad master equation. We show that the engine may operate in four different operation modes, depending on the various parameters, in particular it can act as a heat engine and as a refrigerator. We detect an enhancement of the thermodynamic performance as the critical point is crossed, and investigate it in detail

Erratum: Entanglement transitions in the quantum Ising chain: A comparison between different unravelings of the same Lindbladian [Phys. Rev. B 105, 064305 (2022)]

Correction to https://dx.doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevB.105.064305

Entanglement dynamics with string measurement operators

We explain how to apply a Gaussian-preserving operator to a fermionic Gaussian state. We use this method to study the evolution of the entanglement entropy of an Ising spin chain following a Lindblad dynamics with string measurement operators, focusing on the quantum-jump unraveling of such Lindbladian. We find that the asymptotic entanglement entropy obeys an area law for finite-range string operators and a volume law for ranges of the string which scale with the system size. The same behavior is observed for the measurement-only dynamics, suggesting that measurements can play a leading role in this context.Comment: 27 pages, 4 figure

Symmetries and conserved quantities of boundary time crystals in generalized spin models

We investigate how symmetries and conserved quantities relate to the occurrence of the boundary time crystal (BTC) phase in a generalized spin model with Lindblad dissipation. BTCs are a non-equilibrium phase of matter in which the system, coupled to an external environment, breaks the continuous time translational invariance. We perform a detailed mean-field study aided by a finite-size analysis of the quantum model of a p,q-spin-interaction system, a generalized p-spin interaction system, which can be implemented in fully-connected spin-1/2 ensembles. We find the following conditions for the observation of the BTC phase: First, the BTC appears when the discrete symmetry held by the Hamiltonian, $\mathbb{Z}_2$ in the considered models, is explicitly broken by the Lindblad jump operators. Second, the system must be coupled uniformly to the same bath in order to preserve the total angular momentum during the time evolution. If these conditions are not satisfied, any oscillatory behavior appears only as a transient in the dynamics and a time-independent stationary state is eventually reached. Our results suggest that these two elements may be general requirements for the observation of a stable BTC phase relating symmetries and conserved quantities in arbitrary spin models.Comment: 16 pages, 10 figure

Dynamical phase transition in the transverse field Ising chain characterized by the transverse magnetization spectral function

We study the response of a quantum Ising chain to transverse field oscillations in the asymptotic state attained after a quantum quench. We show that for quenches across a quantum phase transition, the dissipative part of the response at low frequencies is negative, corresponding to energy emission up to a critical frequency \u3c9 17. The latter is found to be connected to the time period t 17 of the singularities in the Loschmidt echo (t 17=2\u3c0/\u3c9 17) signaling the presence of a dynamical quantum phase transition. This result suggests that a linear-response experiment can be used to detect this kind of phenomenon. \ua9 2019 American Physical Society

Crossover from fast to slow dynamics in a long range interacting Ising chain

Quantum many body systems with long range interactions are known to display many fascinating phenomena experimentally observable in trapped ions, Rydberg atoms and polar molecules. Among these are dynamical phase transitions which occur after an abrupt quench in spin chains with interactions decaying as and whose critical dynamics depend crucially on the power : for systems with the transition is sharp while for it fans out in a chaotic crossover region. In this paper we explore the fate of critical dynamics in Ising chains with long-range interactions when the transverse field is ramped up with a finite speed. While for abrupt quenches we observe a chaotic region that widens as is increased, the width of the crossover region diminishes as the time of the ramp increases, suggesting that chaos will disappear altogether and be replaced by a sharp transition in the adiabatic limit

Entanglement transitions in the quantum Ising chain: A comparison between different unravelings of the same Lindbladian

We study the dynamics of entanglement in the quantum Ising chain with dephasing dissipation in a Lindblad master equation form. We consider two unravelings which preserve the Gaussian form of the state, allowing to address large system sizes. The first unraveling gives rise to a quantum-state-diffusion dynamics, while the second one describes a specific form of quantum-jump evolution, suitably constructed to preserve Gaussianity. In the first case we find a crossover from area-law to logarithm-law entanglement scaling and draw the related phase diagram. In the second case we only find logarithm-law scaling, remarking the different entanglement behavior for different unravelings of the same Lindblad equation. Finally, we compare these outcomes with the predictions of a non-Hermitian Hamiltonian evolution, finding conflicting results.Comment: 15 pages, 9 figure

Dynamical phase diagram of a quantum Ising chain with long-range interactions

We investigate the effect of short-range correlations on the dynamical phase diagram of quantum many-body systems with long-range interactions. Focusing on Ising spin chains with power-law decaying interactions and accounting for short-range correlations by a cluster mean field theory we show that short-range correlations are responsible for the emergence of a chaotic dynamical region. Analyzing the fine details of the phase diagram, we show that the resulting chaotic dynamics bears close analogies with that of a tossed coin. \ua9 2019 American Physical Society