Energy redistribution and spatio-temporal evolution of correlations after a sudden quench of the Bose-Hubbard model

Abstract: An optical-lattice quantum simulator is an ideal experimental platform to investigate non-equilibrium dynamics of a quantum many-body system, which is in general hard to simulate with classical computers. Here, we use our quantum simulator of the Bose-Hubbard model to study dynamics far from equilibrium after a quantum quench. We successfully confirm the energy conservation law in the one- and three-dimensional systems and extract the propagation velocity of the single-particle correlation in the one- and two-dimensional systems. We corroborate the validity of our quantum simulator through quantitative comparisons between the experiments and the exact numerical calculations in one dimension. In the computationally hard cases of two or three dimensions, by using the quantum-simulation results as references, we examine the performance of a numerical method, namely the truncated Wigner approximation, revealing its usefulness and limitation. This work constitutes an exemplary case for the usage of analog quantum simulators.