Photon echo and fractional excitation lensing of $S=1/2$ XY spin chain

Abstract

We study numerically the two-dimensional coherent spectrum (2DCS) of the Tomonaga-Luttinger liquid hosted by the $S=1/2$ XY spin chain. The 2DCS characterizes the system's third order nonlinear magnetic response triggered by three pulses, separated successively by the delay time and the waiting time. It exhibits a photon echo signal resulting from a lensing process of the fractional excitations: A pair of photon-excited fractional excitations, initially moving apart, reverse their direction of motion, and annihilate each other. In the XY chain, the nonlinearity in the dispersion relation of the Jordan-Wigner fermions leads to the dispersion of the fractional excitation wave packets and thereby suppresses lensing. The magnitude of the echo signal decreases exponentially with increasing delay time. The decay rate scales with the temperature $T$ as $T^n$ at low temperature, where $n$ is the leading order of the Jordan-Wigner fermion dispersion, and as $T$ at high temperature. By contrast, as the waiting time increases, the magnitude of the echo signal saturates, reflecting the integrability of the system. Our results illustrate the effectiveness of the 2DCS in detecting subtle dynamical properties of optical excitations in spin chains.