Ab initio derivation of generalised hydrodynamics from a gas of interacting wave packets

Abstract: Hydrodynamics is an efficient theory for describing the large-scale dynamics of many-body systems. The equations of hydrodynamics at the Euler scale are often obtained phenomenologically under the assumption of local entropy maximisation. With integrability, this has led to the theory of generalised hydrodynamics (GHD), based on local generalised Gibbs ensembles. But deriving such equations from the microscopic dynamics itself remains one of the most important challenges of mathematical physics. This is especially true in deterministic, interacting particle systems. We provide an ab initio derivation of the GHD equations in the Lieb-Liniger quantum integrable model describing cold atomic gases in one dimension. The derivation is valid at all interaction strengths, and does not rely on the assumption of local entropy maximisation. For this purpose, we show that a gas of wave packets, formed by macroscopic-scale modulations of Bethe eigenfunctions, behave as a gas of classical particles with a certain integrable dynamics, and that at large scales, this classical dynamics gives rise to the GHD equations. This opens the way for a much deeper mathematical and physical understanding of the hydrodynamics of integrable models.