String Theory seminar - Benjamin Doyon Seminar

The hydrodynamic approximation is an extremely powerful tool to describe the behavior of many-body systems such as gases. At the Euler scale (that is, when variations of densities and currents occur only on large space-time scales), the approximation is based on the idea of local thermodynamic equilibrium: locally, within fluid cells, the system is in a Galilean or relativistic boost of a Gibbs equilibrium state. This is expected to arise in conventional gases thanks to ergodicity and Gibbs thermalization, which in the quantum case is embodied by the eigenstate thermalization hypothesis. However, integrable systems are well known not to thermalize in the standard fashion. The presence of infinitely-many conservation laws preclude Gibbs thermalization, and instead generalized Gibbs ensembles emerge. In this talk I will introduce the associated theory of generalized hydrodynamics (GHD), which applies the hydrodynamic ideas to systems with infinitely-many conservation laws. It describes the dynamics from inhomogeneous states and in inhomogeneous force fields, and is valid both for quantum systems such as experimentally realized one-dimensional interacting Bose gases and quantum Heisenberg chains, and classical ones such as soliton gases and classical field theory. I will give an overview of what GHD is, how its main equations are derived, its relation to quantum and classical integrable systems, and some geometry that lies at its core. I will then explain how it reproduces the effects seen in the famous quantum Newton cradle experiment, and how it leads to exact results in transport problems such as Drude weights and non-equilibrium currents.

This is based on various collaborations with Alvise Bastianello, Olalla Castro Alvaredo, Jean-Sébastien Caux, Jérôme Dubail, Robert Konik, Herbert Spohn, Gerard Watts and my student Takato Yoshimura, and strongly inspired by previous collaborations with Denis Bernard, M. Joe Bhaseen, Andrew Lucas and Koenraad Schalm.