Simulating non-equilibrium dynamics and finite temperature physics: efficient representations for matrix product states

Experimental advances have made it possible to realize and control quantum many-body systems, allowing the experimental study of non-equilibrium phenomena. Due to the Hilbert space growing exponentially with the number of particles, advanced numerical techniques are usually required to understand many-body effects at the theoretical level. In this thesis, we address the question of how to efficiently simulate the non-equilibrium dynamics of many-body systems using matrix product states (MPS). In particular, we consider quantum systems in interaction with macroscopic environments, as they appear in Anderson impurity problems, quantum thermodynamics, or open quantum systems. We develop a low-entanglement representation of the environment with only short-range interactions, perfectly suitable for simulations with MPS. We further show that an interleaved ordering of tight-binding chains can significantly reduce the creation of entanglement, as opposed to an intuitive implementation of the Hamiltonian's geometry. Our approach allows long-time simulations and an analysis of the environmental dynamics, in which, after a sudden quench, we find clear signatures of many-body effects. We employ our techniques to compute spectral functions of impurity models, with possible applications to dynamical mean-field theory impurity solvers, and to calculate dissipation in the non-equilibrium Anderson model with explicit time-dependence, as relevant for ongoing experiments with oscillating tip atomic force microscopes.