Nonequilibrium dynamics of one-dimensional hard-core anyons following a quench: Complete relaxation of one-body observables

Abstract

We demonstrate the role of interactions in driving the relaxation of an isolated integrable quantum system following a sudden quench. We consider a family of integrable hard-core lattice anyon models that continuously interpolates between noninteracting spinless fermions and strongly interacting hard-core bosons. A generalized Jordan-Wigner transformation maps the entire family to noninteracting fermions. We find that, aside from the singular free-fermion limit, the entire single-particle density matrix and therefore all one-body observables relax to the predictions of the generalized Gibbs ensemble (GGE). This demonstrates that, in the presence of interactions, correlations between particles in the many-body wave function provide the effective dissipation required to drive relaxation of all one-body observables to the GGE. This relaxation does not depend on translational invariance, or the tracing out of any spatial domain of the system.

5 pages, 4 figures, plus supplementary material (6 pages, 4 figures). v2: Text shortened, and other minor revisions. To appear in PRL