Work

Freezing and shielding under global quenches for long-range interacting many-body systems

Year: 2026

Type: article

Abstract: We investigate how local perturbations spread on long-range interacting spin chains and show how their nonequilibrium behavior exactly matches the one of a Fermi-Hubbard model with long-range hoppings. We then focus on the thermalization of the fermionic model following a sudden quench of local interactions between two distinct fermionic species. For both models, the quasiparticle spectrum consists of gapped low-energy levels, while the high-energy ones accumulate at a single point. When the low-energy gaps are large enough, turning on the local interactions does not effectively mix high- and low-energy modes, resulting in a freezing of the dynamical evolution. In general, the states within the excited subspace are shielded from the long-range signatures of the model, which are responsible for the low-energy extended states, and the dynamics effectively look as if long-range couplings were absent. This shielding mechanism becomes evident in the presence of disorder. It is shown that shielding and freezing are a universal feature of long-range interacting systems, and their relation to the existence of quasistationary states is conjectured.

Source: Physical Review Research

DOI: 10.1103/f7cn-h597

Authors: Daniel Arrufat-Vicente, Nicolò Defenu

Institution: ETH Zurich

Language: English

Topic: Quantum many-body systems

Subfield: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

Field: Physics and Astronomy

Domain: Physical Sciences

Open Access status: gold

Estimated APC paid: $2,625