Spectroscopy of collective excitations in interacting low-dimensional many-body systems using quench dynamics

Abstract

We study the problem of rapid change of the interaction parameter (quench) in a many-body low-dimensional system. It is shown that, measuring the correlation functions after the quench, the information about a spectrum of collective excitations in a system can be obtained. This observation is supported by analysis of several integrable models and we argue that it is valid for nonintegrable models as well. Our conclusions are supplemented by performing exact numerical simulations on finite systems. We propose that measuring the power spectrum in a dynamically split 1D Bose-Einsten condensate into two coupled condensates can be used as an experimental test of our predictions. © 2007 The American Physical Society.