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arXiv:1303.0782 · Physical Review E

Statistics of the work done by splitting a one-dimensional quasicondensate

Spyros Sotiriadis, Andrea Gambassi, Alessandro Silva

Published May 23, 2013• 69 citations
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Abstract

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.

DOI
10.1103/physreve.87.052129

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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 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.
We present a comparison between the bosonization results for quantum quenches and exact diagonalizations in microscopic models of interacting spinless fermions in a one-dimensional lattice. We show that important features are missed by the bosonization technique, which predicts the persistence of long-wavelength critical properties in the long-time evolution. Instead, numerical analysis provides puzzling evidences: while the momentum distribution appears to be consistent with the presence of a singularity at kFk_FkF​, density-density correlations at small momenta clearly display a thermal-like behavior, namely Nˉq≃const{\bar{N}}_q \simeq {\rm const}Nˉq​≃const (where the overbar indicates the long-time average). This feature at small momenta is preserved in presence of an interaction term that breaks integrability, together with a rounding of the singularities at finite qqq's, showing that the bosonization approach is not able to represent the time evolution of generic one-dimensional models after a quantum quench.
We investigate finite-size effects in quantum quenches on the basis of simple energetic arguments. Distinguishing between the low-energy part of the excitation spectrum, below a microscopic energy scale, and the high-energy regime enables one to define a crossover number of particles that is shown to diverge in the small quench limit. Another crossover number is proposed based on the fidelity between the initial and final ground states. Both criteria can be computed using ground-state techniques that work for systems larger than full-spectrum diagonalization. As examples, two models are studied: one with free bosons in an harmonic trap whose frequency is quenched and the one-dimensional Bose-Hubbard model that is known to be nonintegrable and for which recent studies have uncovered remarkable nonequilibrium behaviors. The diagonal weights of the time-averaged density matrix are computed, and observables obtained from this diagonal ensemble are compared with the ones from statistical ensembles. It is argued that the ``thermalized'' regime of the Bose-Hubbard model, previously observed in the small quench regime, experiences strong finite-size effects that make a thorough comparison with statistical ensembles difficult. In addition, we show that the nonthermalized regime, emerging on finite-size systems and for large interaction quenches, is not related to the existence of an equilibrium quantum critical point but to the high-energy structure of the energy spectrum in the atomic limit. Its features are reminiscent of the quench from the noninteracting limit to the atomic limit.
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.
We study the statistics of the work done by globally changing in time with a generic protocol the mass in a free bosonic field theory with relativistic dispersion and the transverse field in the one-dimensional Ising chain both globally and locally. In the latter case we make the system start from the critical point and we describe it in the scaling limit. We provide exact formulas in all these cases for the full statistics of the work and we show that the low-energy part of the distribution of the work displays an edge singularity whose exponent does not depend on the specifics of the protocol that is chosen and may only depend on the position of the initial and final values with respect to the critical point of the system. We also show that the condensation transition found in the bosonic system for sudden quenches [A. Gambassi and A. Silva, Phys. Rev. Lett. 109, 250602 (2012)] is robust with respect to the choice of the protocol.
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.