Complete generalized Gibbs ensembles in an interacting theory
Physical Review Letters American Physical Society 115:15 (2015) 157201
Authors:
E Ilievski, J De Nardis, B Wouters, JS Caux, Fabian Essler, T Prosen
Abstract:
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 behavior after a general quantum quench. A crucial ingredient in our method, which readily generalizes to other integrable models, are recently discovered quasilocal charges. As a test, we reproduce the exact postquench steady state of the Néel quench problem obtained previously by means of the Quench Action method.