Correlation and entanglement dynamics of free fermions in disguise

We study the nonequilibrium dynamics following a quantum quench in spin chains that can be solved via a mapping to free fermions in disguise. These models feature an exponential degeneracy of all energy eigenvalues, raising the question of the validity of the established framework describing the properties of integrable systems out of equilibrium. We present two main results. First, we develop an analytic method to compute the quasi-momentum distribution function characterizing the generalized Gibbs ensemble, and derive an analytic formula to compute the corresponding expectation values for special observables. Second, we conjecture a modification of the standard formula for the entanglement growth based on the quasi-particle picture, taking into account that each fermion in disguise carries an additional amount of entropy due to the exponential degeneracy of the energy eigenvalues. We test our theoretical predictions against numerical tensor-network computations for different initial states and Hamiltonian parameters. For the local observables, we find excellent agreement. For the entanglement dynamics, we find small deviations suggesting that our conjecture is only approximately correct. Our results represent a first step towards the extension of the established framework of integrable systems out of equilibrium to models hosting free fermions in disguise.

Source: arXiv:2607.02359v1 - http://arxiv.org/abs/2607.02359v1 PDF: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2607.02359v1 Original Link: http://arxiv.org/abs/2607.02359v1