Long term behavior of the stirred vacuum on a Dirac chain: geometry blur and the random Slater ensemble

Abstract

Abstract We characterize the long-term state of the 1D Dirac vacuum stirred by an impenetrable object, modeled as the ground state of a finite free-fermionic chain dynamically perturbed by a moving classical obstacle which suppresses the local hopping amplitudes. We find two different regimes, depending on the velocity of the obstacle. For a slow motion, the effective Floquet Hamiltonian presents features which are typical of the Gaussian orthogonal ensemble, and the occupation of the Floquet modes becomes roughly homogeneous. Moreover, the long term entanglement entropy of a contiguous block follows a Gaussian analogue of Page’s law, i.e. a volumetric behavior. Indeed, the statistical properties of the reduced density matrices correspond to those of a random Slater determinant, which can be described using the Jacobi ensemble from random matrix theory. On the other hand, if the obstacle moves fast enough, the effective Floquet Hamiltonian presents a Poissonian behavior. The nature of the transition is clarified by the entanglement links, which determine the effective geometry underlying the entanglement structure, showing that the one-dimensionality of the physical Hamiltonian dissolves into a random adjacency matrix as we slow down the obstacle motion.