In integrable many-particle systems, it is widely believed that the stationary state reached at late times after a quantum quench can be described by a generalized Gibbs ensemble (GGE) constructed from their extensive number of conserved charges. A crucial issue is then to identify a complete set of these charges, enabling the GGE to provide exact steady state predictions. Here we solve this long-standing problem for the case of the spin-1/2 Heisenberg chain by explicitly constructing a GGE which uniquely fixes the macrostate describing the stationary behaviour after a general quantum quench. A crucial ingredient in our method, which readily generalizes to other integrable models, are recently discovered quasi-local charges. As a test, we reproduce the exact post-quench steady state of the Neel quench problem obtained previously by means of the Quench Action method.
COBISS.SI-ID: 2857572
Generalised hydrodynamics predicts universal ballistic transport in integrable lattice systems when prepared in generic inhomogeneous initial states. However, the ballistic contribution to transport can vanish in systems with additional discrete symmetries. Here we perform large scale numerical simulations of spin dynamics in the anisotropic Heisenberg XXZ spin 1/2 chain starting from an inhomogeneous mixed initial state which is symmetric with respect to a combination of spin-reversal and spatial reflection. In the isotropic and easy-axis regimes we find non-ballistic spin transport which we analyse in detail in terms of scaling exponents of the transported magnetisation and scaling profiles of the spin density. While in the easy-axis regime we find accurate evidence of normal diffusion, the spin transport in the isotropic case is clearly super-diffusive, with the scaling exponent very close to 2/3, but with universal scaling dynamics which obeys the diffusion equation in nonlinearly scaled time.
COBISS.SI-ID: 3115108