Solution for an interaction quench in the Lieb-Liniger Bose gas

Abstract: We study a quench protocol where the ground state of a free many-particle bosonic theory in one dimension is let unitarily evolve in time under the integrable Lieb-Liniger Hamiltonian of $\delta$-interacting repulsive bosons. By using a recently-proposed variational method, we here obtain the exact non-thermal steady-state of the system in the thermodynamic limit, and discuss some of its main physical properties. Besides being a rare case of a thermodynamically exact solution to a truly interacting quench situation, this interestingly represents an example where a naive implementation of the generalized Gibbs ensemble fails.