Critical quench dynamics of random quantum spin chains: Ultra-slow relaxation from initial order and delayed ordering from initial disorder

Gergo Roosz, Yu-Cheng Lin, Ferenc Igloi

Published 2016-11-29Version 1

By means of free fermionic techniques combined with multiple precision arithmetic we study the time evolution of the average magnetization, $\overline{m}(t)$, of the random transverse-field Ising chain after global quenches. We observe different relaxation behaviors for quenches starting from different initial states to the critical point. Starting from a fully ordered initial state, the relaxation is logarithmically slow described by $\overline{m}(t) \sim \ln^a t$, and in a finite sample of length $L$ the average magnetization saturates at a size-dependent plateau $\overline{m}_p(L) \sim L^{-b}$; here the two exponents satisfy the relation $b/a=\psi=1/2$. Starting from a fully disordered initial state, the magnetization stays at zero for a period of time until $t=t_d$ with $\ln t_d \sim L^{\psi}$ and then starts to increase until it saturates to an asymptotic value $\overline{m}_p(L) \sim L^{-b'}$, with $b'\approx 1.5$. For both quenching protocols, finite-size scaling is satisfied in terms of the scaled variable $\ln t/L^{\psi}$. Furthermore, the distribution of long-time limiting values of the magnetization shows that the typical and the average values scale differently and the average is governed by rare events. The non-equilibrium dynamical behavior of the magnetization is explained through semi-classical theory.