Quench-induced entanglement and relaxation dynamics in Luttinger liquids

Abstract

We investigate the time evolution towards the asymptotic steady state of a one-dimensional interacting system after a quantum quench. We show that at finite times the latter induces entanglement between right- and left-moving density excitations, encoded in their cross-correlators, which vanishes in the long-time limit. This behavior results in a universal time decay $\ensuremath{\propto}{t}^{\ensuremath{-}2}$ of the system spectral properties, in addition to nonuniversal power-law contributions typical of Luttinger liquids. Importantly, we argue that the presence of quench-induced entanglement clearly emerges in transport properties, such as charge and energy currents injected in the system from a biased probe and determines their long-time dynamics. In particular, the energy fractionalization phenomenon turns out to be a promising platform to observe the universal power-law decay $\ensuremath{\propto}{t}^{\ensuremath{-}2}$ induced by entanglement and represents a novel way to study the corresponding relaxation mechanism.