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  • Letter
  • Open Access

Freezing and shielding under global quenches for long-range interacting many-body systems

Daniel Arrufat-Vicente* and Nicolò Defenu

  • Institute for Theoretical Physics, ETH Zürich, Wolfgang-Pauli-Straße 27, 8093 Zürich, Switzerland

  • *Contact author: darrufat@phys.ethz.ch
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Phys. Rev. Research 8, L042010 – Published 23 October, 2026

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/f7cn-h597

Abstract

We investigate how local perturbations spread on long-range interacting spin chains and show how their nonequilibrium behavior exactly matches the one of a Fermi-Hubbard model with long-range hoppings. We then focus on the thermalization of the fermionic model following a sudden quench of local interactions between two distinct fermionic species. For both models, the quasiparticle spectrum consists of gapped low-energy levels, while the high-energy ones accumulate at a single point. When the low-energy gaps are large enough, turning on the local interactions does not effectively mix high- and low-energy modes, resulting in a freezing of the dynamical evolution. In general, the states within the excited subspace are shielded from the long-range signatures of the model, which are responsible for the low-energy extended states, and the dynamics effectively look as if long-range couplings were absent. This shielding mechanism becomes evident in the presence of disorder. It is shown that shielding and freezing are a universal feature of long-range interacting systems, and their relation to the existence of quasistationary states is conjectured.

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Phys. Rev. Research 8, L042010– Published 23 October, 2026
  • Received 8 July 2024
  • Revised 12 April 2025
  • Accepted 24 August 2026
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