Boundary perturbation effects in quantum systems with conserved energy and continuous symmetry
We investigate one-dimensional systems with both energy conservation and a continuous symmetry, focusing on the impact of a boundary perturbation that breaks the continuous symmetry. Our study reveals two distinct dynamical phases: one in which the corresponding charge exhibits extensive fluctuations, and another where the charge remains conserved. These phases appear in both free and interacting models. We interpret this behavior through a boundary-induced pumping mechanism, which estimates the amplitude connecting two degenerate states from different charge sectors via a local charge-non-conserving operator. In the Floquet setting, we show that the frozen phase can survive at high driving frequencies but vanishes at low frequencies. This phenomenon is exact in free-fermion systems in the thermodynamic limit, but in interacting systems it appears only at finite system size. The emergence of the charge-frozen phase is attributed to effective energy conservation, and we demonstrate that this phase disappears when effective energy conservation is broken or replaced by other symmetries.
Authors
- Qu-Cheng Gao
- Xiao Chen (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0242-7193)
Institutions
- Boston College (US)
Publication Details
- Journal
- Physical review. B./Physical review. B
- Published
- 2026-02-23
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.1103/5j2h-ftvc
- Primary Topic
- Quantum chaos and dynamical systems
- Type
- article
- Field-Weighted Citation Impact
- 0.00