Translation symmetry restoration under random unitary dynamics

Abstract

The finite parts of a large, locally interacting many-body system prepared out of equilibrium eventually equilibrate. Characterizing the underlying mechanisms of this process and its timescales, however, is particularly hard as it requires one to decouple universal features from observable-specific ones. Recently, additional insight was gained by studying how certain symmetries of the dynamics that are broken by the initial state are restored at the level of the reduced state of a given subsystem. This provides a high-level, observable-independent probe. Until now, this idea has been applied to the restoration of internal symmetries, e.g., U(1) symmetries related to charge conservation. Here we show that the same logic can be applied to the restoration of space-time symmetries, and hence can be used to characterize the relaxation of fully generic systems. We illustrate this idea by considering the paradigmatic example of “generic” many-body dynamics, i.e., a local random unitary circuit, where our method leads to exact results. We show that the restoration of translation symmetry in these systems only happens on timescales that are proportional to the subsystem's volume. In fact, for large enough subsystems, the time of symmetry restoration becomes initial-state independent (as long as the latter breaks the symmetry at time zero) and coincides with the thermalization time. For intermediate subsystems, however, one can observe the “quantum Mpemba effect,” where the state of the system restores a symmetry faster if it is initially more asymmetric. We provide an exact characterization of this effect in a nonintegrable system. Published by the American Physical Society 2025