Quantum transport of strongly interacting fermions in one dimension at far-out-of-equilibrium

Abstract

In the study of quantum transport, much has been known for dynamics near thermal equilibrium. However, quantum transport far away from equilibrium is much less well understood--the linear response approximation does not hold for physics far-out-of-equilibrium in general. In this work, motivated by recent cold atom experiments on probing quantum many-body dynamics of a one-dimensional XXZ spin chain, we study the strong interaction limit of the one-dimensional spinless fermion model, which is dual to the XXZ spin chain. We develop a highly efficient computation algorithm for simulating the non-equilibrium dynamics of this system exactly, and examine the non-equilibrium dynamics starting from a density modulation quantum state. We find ballistic transport in this strongly correlated setting, and show a plane-wave description emerges at long-time evolution. We also observe sharp distinction between transport velocities in short and long times as induced by interaction effects, and provide a quantitative interpretation for the long-time transport velocity.