Quench dynamics and relaxation in isolated integrable quantum spin chains

Understand

We review the dynamics after quantum quenches in integrable quantum spin chains.

• We give a pedagogical introduction to relaxation in isolated quantum systems, and discuss the description of the steady state by (gen- eralized) Gibbs ensembles.
• When then turn to general features in the time evolution of local observables after the quench, using a simple model of free fermions as an example.
• In the second part we present an overview of recent progress in describing quench dynamics in two key paradigms for quantum integrable models, the transverse field Ising chain and the anisotropic spin-1/2 Heisenberg chain.