Quantum Hydrodynamics in Spin Chains with Phase Space Methods

Abstract: Connecting short time microscopic dynamics with long time hydrodynamics in strongly correlated quantum systems is one of the outstanding questions. In particular, it is very difficult to determine various hydrodynamic coefficients like the diffusion constant or viscosity starting from a microscopic model: exact quantum simulations are limited to either small system sizes or to short times, which are insufficient to reach asymptotic behavior. In this Letter, we show that these difficulties, at least for a particular model, can be circumvented by using the cluster truncated Wigner approximation (CTWA), which maps quantum Hamiltonian dynamics into classical Hamiltonian dynamics in auxiliary high-dimensional phase space. We apply CTWA to a XXZ next-nearest-neighbor spin 1/2 chain and find behavior consisting of short time spin relaxation which gradually crosses over to emergent diffusive behavior at long times. For a random initial state we show that CTWA correctly reproduces the whole spin spectral function. Necessary in this construction is sampling from properly fluctuating initial conditions: the Dirac mean-field (variational) ansatz, which neglects such fluctuations, leads to incorrect predictions.