The entanglement spectrum of a pure state of a bipartite system is the full set of eigenvalues of the reduced density matrix obtained from tracing out one part. Such spectra are known in several cases to contain important information beyond that in the entanglement entropy. This paper studies the entanglement spectrum for a variety of critical and near-critical quantum lattice models in one dimension, chiefly by the infinite time evolving block decimation (iTEBD) numerical method, which enables both integrable and non-integrable models to be studied. We find that the distribution of eigenvalues in the entanglement spectra agrees with an approximate result derived by Calabrese and Lefevre to an accuracy of a few per cent for all models studied. This result applies whether the correlation length is intrinsic or generated by the finite matrix size accessible in iTEBD. For the transverse Ising model, the known exact results from Peschel and Eisler for the entanglement spectrum are used to confirm the validity of the iTEBD approach. For more general models, no exact result is available but the iTEBD results directly test the hypothesis that all moments of the reduced density matrix are determined by a single parameter.

Finite-temperature transport properties of one-dimensional systems can be studied using the time dependent density matrix renormalization group via the introduction of auxiliary degrees of freedom which purify the thermal statistical operator. We demonstrate how the numerical effort of such calculations is reduced when the physical time evolution is augmented by an additional time evolution within the auxiliary Hilbert space. Specifically, we explore a variety of integrable and non-integrable, gapless and gapped models at temperatures ranging from T = ∞ down to T/bandwidth = 0.05 and study both (i) linear response where (heat and charge) transport coefficients are determined by the current–current correlation function and (ii) non-equilibrium driven by arbitrary large temperature gradients. The modified density matrix renormalization algorithm removes an 'artificial' build-up of entanglement between the auxiliary and physical degrees of freedom. Thus, longer time scales can be reached.