Transient Loschmidt Echo in Quenched Ising Chains

Abstract: We study the response to sudden local perturbations of highly excited Quantum Ising Spin Chains. The key quantity encoding this response is the overlap between time-dependent wave functions, which we write as a two-times Loschmidt echo. Its asymptotics at long time differences contains crucial information about the structure of the highly excited non-equilibrium environment induced by the quench. We compute the Echo perturbatively for a weak local quench but for arbitrarily large global quench, using a cumulant expansion. Our perturbative results suggest that the Echo decays exponentially, rather than power law as in the low-energy Orthogonality Catastrophe, a further example of quench-induced decoherence already found in the case of quenched Luttinger Liquids. The emerging decoherence scale is set by the strenght of the local potential and the bulk excitation energy.