Quench Dynamics of Isolated Many-Body Quantum Systems

Abstract

We study isolated quantum systems with two-body interactions after a quench. In these systems, the energy shell is a Gaussian of width $\sigma$, and it gives the maximum possible spreading of the energy distribution of the initial states. When the distribution achieves this shape, the fidelity decay can be Gaussian until saturation. This establishes a lower bound for the fidelity decay in realistic systems. An ultimate bound for systems with many-body interactions is also derived based on the analysis of full random matrices. We find excellent agreement between numerical and analytical results. We also provide the conditions under which the short-time dynamics of few-body observables is controlled by $\sigma$. The analyses are developed for systems, initial states, and observables accessible to experiments.