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arXiv:0811.2527 · Physical Review A

Nonadiabaticity and large fluctuations in a many-particle Landau-Zener problem

Alexander Altland, Victor Gurarie, Thomas Kriecherbauer, Anatoli Polkovnikov

Published Apr 2, 2009• 90 citations
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Abstract

We consider the behavior of an interacting many-particle system under slow external driving---a many-body generalization of the Landau-Zener paradigm. We find that a conspiracy of interactions and driving leads to physics profoundly different from that of the single-particle limit: for practically all values of the driving rate the particle distributions in Hilbert space are very broad, a phenomenon caused by a strong amplification of quantum fluctuations in the driving process. These fluctuations are ``nonadiabatic'' in that even at very slow driving it is exceedingly difficult to push the center of the distribution toward the limit of full ground-state occupancy. We obtain these results by a number of complementary theoretical approaches, including diagrammatic perturbation theory, semiclassical analysis, and exact diagonalization.

DOI
10.1103/physreva.79.042703

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We consider the behavior of an interacting many-particle system under slow external driving---a many-body generalization of the Landau-Zener paradigm. We find that a conspiracy of interactions and driving leads to physics profoundly different from that of the single-particle limit: for practically all values of the driving rate the particle distributions in Hilbert space are very broad, a phenomenon caused by a strong amplification of quantum fluctuations in the driving process. These fluctuations are ``nonadiabatic'' in that even at very slow driving it is exceedingly difficult to push the center of the distribution toward the limit of full ground-state occupancy. We obtain these results by a number of complementary theoretical approaches, including diagrammatic perturbation theory, semiclassical analysis, and exact diagonalization.
We formulate and approximately solve a specific many body generalization of the Landau-Zener problem. Unlike with the single particle Landau-Zener problem, our system does not abide in the adiabatic ground state, even at very slow driving rates. The structure of the theory suggests that this finding reflects a more general phenomenon in the physics of adiabatically driven many particle systems. Our solution can be used to understand, for example, the behavior of two-level systems coupled to an electromagnetic field, as realized in cavity QED experiments.
We consider dynamics of Dicke models, with and without counterrotating terms, under slow variations of parameters which drive the system through a quantum phase transition. The model without counterrotating terms and sweeped detuning is seen in the contexts of a many-body generalization of the Landau-Zener model and the dynamical passage through a second-order quantum phase transition (QPT). Adiabaticity is destroyed when the parameter crosses a critical value. Applying semiclassical analysis based on concepts of classical adiabatic invariants and mapping to the second Painleve equation (PII), we derive a formula which accurately describes particle distributions in the Hilbert space at wide range of parameters and initial conditions of the system. We find striking universal features in the particle distributions which can be probed in an experiment on Feshbach resonance passage or a cavity QED experiment. The dynamics is found to be crucially dependent on the direction of the sweep. The model with counterrotating terms has been realized recently in an experiment with ultracold atomic gases in a cavity. Its semiclassical dynamics is described by a Hamiltonian system with two degrees of freedom. Passage through a QPT corresponds to passage through a bifurcation, and can also be described by PII (after averaging over fast variables), leading to similar universal distributions. Under certain conditions, the Dicke model is reduced to the Lipkin-Meshkov-Glick model.
Motivated by recent cold-atom experiments in optical lattices, we consider a lattice version of the Landau-Zener problem. Every single site is described by a Landau-Zener problem, but due to particle tunneling between neighboring lattice sites this on-site single-particle Landau-Zener dynamics couples to the particle motion within the lattice. The lattice, apart from having a dephasing effect on single-site Landau-Zener transitions, also implies, in the presence of a confining trap, an intersite particle flow induced by the Landau-Zener sweeping. This gives rise to an interplay between intra- and intersite dynamics. The adiabaticity constraint is therefore not simply given by the standard one, the Hamiltonian rate of change relative to the gap of the on-site problem. In experimentally realistic situations, the full system evolution is well described by Franck-Condon physics; e.g., nonadiabatic excitations are predominantly external ones characterized by large phononic vibrations in the atomic cloud, while internal excitations are very weak as close-to-perfect on-site transitions take place.
We investigate the dissipative influence of environmental fluctuations on the dynamics of driven quantum systems at an avoided crossing. We derive two simple approximative equations valid for weak system-bath coupling and compare results for the dissipative Landau-Zener problem with numerically exact results. Very good agreement is found for slow, i.e., adiabatic, driving. Specifically, the minimum in the Landau-Zener probability resulting from the competition of driving and dissipation is well described. For system-bath couplings and temperatures, where this minimum is observed in the adiabatic driving regime, good agreement is also observed for fast driving when the dynamics tends toward nonadiabatic behavior. Otherwise, however, for large temperatures and fast driving our approximation fails even for weak system-bath couplings, for which an undriven system is still accurately described by weak-coupling approximations.
A simple stochastic model is proposed describing the nonadiabatic transitions in level crossing with energy fluctuation. The model is an extension of Zener's model having a diagonal energy term fluctuating as a Markoffian Gaussian process. The transition rate P ∞ defined in terms of the diabatic basis is calculated exactly by the formal perturbation expansion with respect to the off-diagonal coupling in the two limiting cases: In the slow fluctuation limit, P ∞ coincides with the Landau-Zener formula, P∞=PLZ≡1−exp⁡(−2πJ2/ℏ∣v∣)P_{\infty}=P_{\text{LZ}} \equiv 1 - \exp (-2 \pi J^{2}/\hbar |v|)P∞​=PLZ​≡1−exp(−2πJ2/ℏ∣v∣), where J is the off-diagonal coupling constant and v is the velocity of the change of the mean energy difference. In the strong damping limit, which is a limiting case of large fluctuation amplitude in the rapid fluctuation limit, P ∞ is given by the formula, P∞=PSD≡{1−exp⁡(−4πJ2/ℏ∣v∣)}/2P_{\infty}=P_{\text{SD}} \equiv \{1 - \exp (-4 \pi J^{2}/\hbar |v|)\}/2P∞​=PSD​≡{1−exp(−4πJ2/ℏ∣v∣)}/2.
It was recently argued that one-dimensional systems of several strongly interacting fermions of different mass undergo critical transitions between different spatial orderings when the external confinement adiabatically changes its shape. In this work, we explore their dynamical properties when finite-time drivings are considered. By detailed analysis of many-body spectra, we show that the dynamics is typically guided only by the lowest eigenstates and may be well understood in the language of the generalized Landau-Zener mechanism. In this way, we can precisely capture the dynamical response of the system to the external driving. As a consequence, we show that by appropriate tailoring of the parameters of the driving, one can target the desired many-body state in a noninfinite time. Our theoretical predictions can be straightforwardly utilized in upcoming state-of-the-art experiments with ultracold atoms.