Stationary states in a free fermionic chain from the quench action method
Andrea De LucaLaboratoire de Physique Theorique de l'ENS and Institut Philippe Meyer, Paris, FranceGabriele MartelloniDipartimento di Fisica dell'Università di Pisa and INFN, Pisa, ItalyJacopo VitiLaboratoire de Physique Theorique de l'ENS and CNRS, Paris, France
2015en
ABI
Abstract
We employ the quench action method for a recently considered geometrical quantum quench: two free fermionic chains initially at different temperatures are joined together in the middle and let evolve unitarily with a translation invariant Hamiltonian. We show that two different stationary regimes are reached at long times, depending on the interplay between the observation time scale $T$ and the total length $L$ of the system. We show the emergence of a nonequilibrium steady state supporting an energy current for observation time $T$ much smaller than the system size $L$. We then identify a longer time scale for which thermalization occurs in a generalized Gibbs ensemble.
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