Domain wall melting in the spin-1/2 XXZ spin chain: Emergent Luttinger liquid with a fractal quasiparticle charge

In spin chains with local unitary evolution preserving the magnetization S-z, the domain-wall state vertical bar ... up arrow up arrow up arrow up arrow up arrow down arrow down arrow down arrow down arrow down arrow...> typically "melts." At large times, a nontrivial magnetization profile develops in an expanding region around the initial position of the domain wall. For nonintegrable dynamics, the melting is diffusive, with entropy production within a melted region of size root t. In contrast, when the evolution is integrable, ballistic transport dominates and results in a melted region growing linearly in time, with no extensive entropy production: The spin chain remains locally in states of zero entropy at any time. Here we show that, for the integrable spin-1/2 XXZ chain, low-energy quantum fluctuations in the melted region give rise to an emergent Luttinger liquid which, remarkably, differs from the equilibrium one. The striking feature of this emergent Luttinger liquid is its quasiparticle charge (or Luttinger parameter K), which acquires a fractal dependence on the XXZ chain anisotropy parameter Delta.