Superdiffusion, normal diffusion and chaos in semiclassical Bose-Hubbard chains

TL;DR

This paper investigates the dynamics of correlation functions in semiclassical Bose-Hubbard chains, revealing an early superdiffusive regime driven by initial conditions, transitioning to normal diffusion influenced by system integrability and chaos.

Contribution

It introduces a detailed analysis of superdiffusion and diffusion crossover in Bose-Hubbard chains using TWA with quantum jumps, highlighting the role of initial conditions and nonintegrability.

Findings

Early superdiffusion is universal and independent of chaos.

Transition to normal diffusion depends on nonintegrability strength.

Superdiffusive regime is a distinct early-time phenomenon, not prethermalization.

Abstract

We study the evolution of two-point correlation functions of one-dimensional Bose-Hubbard model in the semiclassical regime in the framework of Truncated Wigner Approximation (TWA) with quantum jumps as first-order corrections. At early times, the correlation functions show strong superdiffusion with universal integer exponents determined solely by the initial conditions and completely insensitive to system parameters and chaos. Only after a long time this regime crosses over to normal diffusion regime which is most robust when nonintegrability is strong. For strong nonintegrability, the system ends up in a homogeneous state while for weak nonintegrability the oscillations and inhomogeneities persist, despite the fact that chaos is nearly always strong and only weakly depends on nonintegrability parameter. We conclude that the superidiffusive regime is neither prethermalized nor a precursor to thermalization but a novel early-time phenomenon related to a special scaling symmetry of the Bose-Hubbard Hamiltonian.