Real-time dynamics of typical and untypical states in nonintegrable systems

Abstract

Understanding (i) the emergence of diffusion from truly microscopic principles continues to be a major challenge in experimental and theoretical physics. At the same time, isolated quantum many-body systems have experienced an upsurge of interest in recent years. Since in such systems the realization of a proper initial state is the only possibility to induce a nonequilibrium process, understanding (ii) the largely unexplored role of the specific realization is vitally important. Our work reports a substantial step forward and tackles the two issues (i) and (ii) in the context of typicality, entanglement as well as integrability and nonintegrability. Specifically, we consider the spin-1/2 XXZ chain, where integrability can be broken due to an additional next-nearest neighbor interaction, and study the real-time and real-space dynamics of nonequilibrium magnetization profiles for a class of pure states. Summarizing our main results, we show that signatures of diffusion for strong interactions are equally pronounced for the integrable and nonintegrable case. In both cases, we further find a clear difference between the dynamics of states with and without internal randomness. We provide an explanation of this difference by a detailed analysis of the local density of states.