Ultrafast dynamics of cold Fermi gas after a local quench

TL;DR

This paper investigates the ultrafast non-equilibrium dynamics of two cold Fermi gas reservoirs after a local quench, revealing rapid entropy production and correlation growth faster than thermal transport, with implications for ultracold atom experiments.

Contribution

It introduces a detailed analysis of entropy and energy dynamics in coupled Fermi gases post-quench, highlighting the rapid growth of quantum correlations on Fermi timescales.

Findings

Von Neumann entropy production is faster than thermal transport.

Energy increases in reservoirs are due to quench work, independent of initial temperature.

Entropies grow faster than heat flow once reservoirs are coupled.

Abstract

We consider non-equilibrium dynamics of two initially independent reservoirs $A$ and $B$ filled with a cold Fermi gas coupled and decoupled by two quantum quenches following one another. We find that the von Neumann entropy production induced by the quench is faster than thermal transport between the reservoirs and defines the short-time dynamics of the system. We analyze the energy change in the system which adds up the heat transferred between $A$ and $B$ and the work done by the quench to uncouple the reservoirs. In the case when $A$ and $B$ interact for a short time, we notice an energy increase in both reservoirs upon decoupling. This energy gain results from the quench's work and does not depend on the initial temperature imbalance between the reservoirs. We relate the quench's work to the mutual correlations of $A$ and $B$ expressed through their von Neumann entropies. Utilizing this relation, we show that once $A$ and $B$ become coupled, their entropies grow (on a timescale of the Fermi time) faster than the heat flow within the system. This result may provide a track of quantum correlations' generation at finite temperatures which one may probe in ultracold atoms, where we expect the characteristic timescale of correlations' growth to be $\sim 0.1 {\rm ms}$.