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arXiv:1106.2671

Statistics of the Work in Quantum Quenches, Universality and the Critical Casimir Effect

Andrea Gambassi, Alessandro Silva

Published Jun 14, 2011• 15 citations
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Abstract

We consider the dynamics of an isolated quantum many-body system after a sudden change of one control parameter, focusing on the statistics of the work done. We establish a connection between the generating function of the distribution of the work and the partition function of a classical system in a film geometry. Using this connection, we first show that the scaling of the fidelity susceptibilities close to a quantum phase transition can be understood in terms of the critical behavior of the excess entropy and specific heat in the classical model. Remarkably, we show that the statistics of the work close to the threshold and to criticality is connected to the so-called critical Casimir free energy which is responsible for the interaction between the boundaries of the classical system. On the basis of this relation, we highlight the emerging universal features of the statistics of the work. Our findings are exemplified for a global quench of the transverse Ising chain at zero temperature.

DOI
10.48550/arxiv.1106.2671

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We consider the dynamics of an isolated quantum many-body system after a sudden change of one control parameter, focusing on the statistics of the work done. We establish a connection between the generating function of the distribution of the work and the partition function of a classical system in a film geometry. Using this connection, we first show that the scaling of the fidelity susceptibilities close to a quantum phase transition can be understood in terms of the critical behavior of the excess entropy and specific heat in the classical model. Remarkably, we show that the statistics of the work close to the threshold and to criticality is connected to the so-called critical Casimir free energy which is responsible for the interaction between the boundaries of the classical system. On the basis of this relation, we highlight the emerging universal features of the statistics of the work. Our findings are exemplified for a global quench of the transverse Ising chain at zero temperature.
In this contribution, we aim to illustrate how quantum work statistics can be used as a tool in order to gain insight on the universal features of non-equilibrium many-body systems. Focusing on the two-point measurement approach to work, we first outline the formalism and show how the related irreversible entropy production may be defined for a unitary process. We then explore the physics of sudden quenches from the point of view of work statistics and show how the characteristic function of work can be expressed as the partition function of a corresponding classical statistical physics problem in a film geometry. Connections to the concept of fidelity susceptibility are explored along with the corresponding universal critical scaling. We also review how large deviation theory applied to quantum work statistics gives further insight to universal properties. The quantum-to-classical mapping turns out to have close connections with the historical problem of orthogonality catastrophe: we therefore discuss how this relationship may be exploited in order to experimentally extract quantum work statistics in many-body systems.
We study the large deviation statistics of the intensive work done by globally changing a control parameter in a thermally isolated quantum many-body system. We show that, upon approaching a critical point, large deviations well below the mean work display universal features related to the critical Casimir effect in the corresponding classical system. Large deviations well above the mean are, instead, of quantum nature and not captured by the quantum-to-classical correspondence. For a bosonic system we show that in this latter regime a transition from exponential to power-law statistics, analogous to the equilibrium Bose-Einstein condensation, may occur depending on the parameters of the quench and on the spatial dimensionality.
Motivated by experiments on splitting one-dimensional quasicondensates, we study the statistics of the work done by a quantum quench in a bosonic system. We discuss the general features of the probability distribution of the work and focus on its behavior at the lowest energy threshold, which develops an edge singularity. A formal connection between this probability distribution and the critical Casimir effect in thin classical films shows that certain features of the edge singularity are universal as the postquench gap tends to zero. Our results are quantitatively illustrated by an exact calculation for noninteracting bosonic systems. The effects of finite system size, dimensionality, and nonzero initial temperature are discussed in detail.
We study the dynamical response of a system to a sudden change of the tuning parameter $\ensuremath{\lambda}$ starting (or ending) at the quantum critical point. In particular, we analyze the scaling of the excitation probability, number of excited quasiparticles, heat and entropy with the quench amplitude, and the system size. We extend the analysis to quenches with arbitrary power law dependence on time of the tuning parameter, showing a close connection between the scaling behavior of these quantities with the singularities of the adiabatic susceptibilities of order mmm at the quantum critical point, where mmm is related to the power of the quench. Precisely for sudden quenches, the relevant susceptibility of the second order coincides with the fidelity susceptibility. We discuss the generalization of the scaling laws to the finite-temperature quenches and show that the statistics of the low-energy excitations becomes important. We illustrate the relevance of those results for cold-atom experiments.
Dynamic correlation and response functions of classical and quantum systems in thermal equilibrium are connected by fluctuation-dissipation theorems, which allow an alternative definition of their (unique) temperature. Motivated by this fundamental property, we revisit the issue of thermalization of closed many-body quantum systems long after a sudden quench, focusing on the nonequilibrium dynamics of the Ising chain in a critical transverse field. We show the emergence of distinct observable-dependent effective temperatures, which rule out Gibbs thermalization in a strict sense but might still have a thermodynamic meaning.
This thesis reports the results obtained during my PhD research in the field of out of equilibrium quantum many-body systems. Chapter 1 consists in a brief introduction of the field and the introduction of concept that are useful for the following chapters. In Chapter 2 the statistics of the work as a tool for characterizing the dynamics of many-body quantum systems is introduced its general features discussed. Then, such a statistics is computed for generic time-dependent protocols (both global and local) in the quantum Ising chain and in the Gaussian field theory, showing, in particular, that in its low-energy part there are features that are independent of the details of the specific chosen protocol. Chapter 3 is devoted to the study of the dynamical phase transition in the O(N)O(N)O(N) quantum vector model in the N→∞N \rightarrow \inftyN→∞ limit, whose critical properties in generic dimensions are characterized. Moreover, a strong connection between such a transition and the statistics of excitations produced in a double quench as a function of the waiting time is showed. The chapter ends by studying the fate of the dynamical transition and the its critical properties when a ramp of finite duration τ\tauτ is applied to the system instead of a sudden quench. In particular, we will show that when τ→∞\tau \rightarrow \inftyτ→∞ the critical point tends to the equilibrium critical point (at zero temperature) in a power-law fashion and that for every finite τ\tauτ the critical properties are always the same (and different from the equilibrium critical properties). Finally in Chapter 4 we will discuss the emergence of a non adiabatic behavior in the dynamics of the order parameter for a low dimensional quantum system driven within a gapped phase by considering in detail the case of a quantum Ising chain subject to a linear variation in time of the transverse field, showing that, no matter how slowly the ramp is performed, such a change leads eventually to the disruption of the order.