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arXiv:2309.12827 · Physical review. B./Physical review. B

Reducing defect production in random transverse-field Ising chains by inhomogeneous driving fields

Róbert Juhász, Gergő Roósz

Published Dec 14, 2023• 4 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

In transverse-field Ising models, disorder in the couplings gives rise to a drastic reduction of the critical energy gap and, accordingly, to an unfavorable, slower-than-algebraic scaling of the density of defects produced when the system is driven through its quantum critical point. By applying Kibble-Zurek theory and numerical calculations, we demonstrate in the one-dimensional model that the scaling of defect density with annealing time can be made algebraic by balancing the coupling disorder with suitably chosen inhomogeneous driving fields. Depending on the tail of the coupling distribution at zero, balancing can be either perfect, leading to the well-known inverse-square law of the homogeneous system, or partial, still resulting in an algebraic decrease but with a smaller, nonuniversal exponent. We also study defect production during an environment-temperature quench of the open variant of the model in which the system is slowly cooled down to its quantum critical point. According to our scaling and numerical results, uncorrelated disorder induces a logarithmic temporal decrease of the defect density, while balanced disorder leads again to an algebraic decay.

DOI
10.1103/physrevb.108.224203

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In transverse-field Ising models, disorder in the couplings gives rise to a drastic reduction of the critical energy gap and, accordingly, to an unfavorable, slower-than-algebraic scaling of the density of defects produced when the system is driven through its quantum critical point. By applying Kibble-Zurek theory and numerical calculations, we demonstrate in the one-dimensional model that the scaling of defect density with annealing time can be made algebraic by balancing the coupling disorder with suitably chosen inhomogeneous driving fields. Depending on the tail of the coupling distribution at zero, balancing can be either perfect, leading to the well-known inverse-square law of the homogeneous system, or partial, still resulting in an algebraic decrease but with a smaller, nonuniversal exponent. We also study defect production during an environment-temperature quench of the open variant of the model in which the system is slowly cooled down to its quantum critical point. According to our scaling and numerical results, uncorrelated disorder induces a logarithmic temporal decrease of the defect density, while balanced disorder leads again to an algebraic decay.
The Kibble-Zurek mechanism describes defect production due to non-adiabatic passage through a critical point. Here we study its variant from ramping the environment temperature to a critical point. We find that the defect density scales as [Formula: see text] or [Formula: see text] for thermal or quantum critical points, respectively, in terms of the usual critical exponents and [Formula: see text] the speed of the drive. Both scalings describe reduced defect density compared to conventional Kibble-Zurek mechanism, which stems from the enhanced relaxation due to bath-system interaction. Ramping to the quantum critical point is investigated by studying the Lindblad equation for the transverse field Ising chain in the presence of thermalizing bath, with couplings to environment obeying detailed balance, confirming the predicted scaling. The von-Neumann or the system-bath entanglement entropy follows the same scaling. Our results are generalized to a large class of dissipative systems with power-law energy dependent bath spectral densities as well.
We analyze mechanisms for universal out-of-equilibrium dynamics near criticality by exploring the effect of randomized quantum resetting (QR) under a finite-time quench across a quantum phase transition. Using the transverse-field Ising chain as a generic model and exploiting its exact solution, QR is found to cause a crossover of the scaling of the topological defect density with the time scale τττ of the quench, from Kibble-Zurek to anti-Kibble-Zurek scaling as τττ increases. This reflects a competition between non-adiabatic quench-driven excitations and QR, giving rise to local minima of the defect densities at optimal annealing times. These times and the corresponding local minima are shown to scale as universal power laws with the rate of QR. Additional results for the scaling of the mean excess energy suggest that a system driven across a quantum critical point exhibits the same scaling behavior under a linear quench with QR as with uncorrelated noise.
Based on the strong-disorder renormalization group method, a microscopic mechanism of defect formation in the quantum annealing of the random transverse-field Ising chain is proposed, which represents the annealing process as a gradual aggregation of strongly coupled spin clusters. The ferromagnetic ground state of clusters is either preserved or get excited in pairwise fusions of clusters, depending on the effective annealing rate of the fusion, the latter events being responsible for the appearance of defects in the final state. A consequence of the theory is that, although the Griffiths-McCoy phases surrounding the critical point are gapless, they are still effectively gapped from the point of view of quantum annealing. Thereby we provide an explanation of the finiteness of gap outside of the critical point, which was implicit in an early approach to the problem by Kibble-Zurek scaling [Dziarmaga, Phys. Rev. B {\bf 74}, 064416 (2006)]. Furthermore, by identifying the accessible excitations, we refine the functional form of the vanishing of the gap at the critical point. The defect density in the final state is found to decrease with the annealing time τττ, as n(τ)∼ln⁡−2(τln⁡2τ)n(τ)\sim \ln^{-2}\left(\fracτ{\ln^2τ}\right)n(τ)∼ln−2(ln2ττ​) for large τττ. In addition to this, our approach gives access also to the density of defects at intermediate times of the annealing process.
We derive an extension of the generalized Kibble-Zurek mechanism (KZM), which provides a stochastic approach to defect formation, to reverse quench protocols. While the universal scaling behavior of defects in reverse quenches has been observed previously in certain 1D chains, we argument from a probability-theoretical perspective that this scaling persists in general, and is given by the double of the defect density variance in forward quenches. We validate these results analytically for the one-dimensional transverse field Ising model and numerically for its bond-disordered variant governed by an infinite randomness fixed point. Starting from the paramagnetic phase, this protocol relies solely on global control of the system's magnetic field and global magnetization measurements, enabling the extraction of critical exponents without microscopic access to individual defects. This approach offers a robust and experimentally feasible method for probing quantum critical behavior through entirely global operations.
In the nonadiabatic dynamics across a quantum phase transition, the Kibble-Zurek paradigm describes that the average number of topological defects is suppressed as a universal power law with the quench time scale. A conflicting observation, termed anti-Kibble-Zurek dynamics, has been reported in several studies, specifically in the driven systems with an uncorrelated stochastic (white) noise. Here, we study the defect generation in the driven transverse field/anisotropy quantum XY model in the presence of a correlated (colored) Gaussian noise. We propose a generic conjecture that properly captures the noise-induced excitation features, which shows good agreement with the numerical simulations. We show that the dynamical features of defect density are modified by varying the noise correlation time. Our numerical simulations confirm that, for fast noises, the dynamics of the defect density is the same as that of the uncorrelated (white) noise, as is expected. However, the larger ratio of noise correlation time to the annealing time results in larger defect density formation and reforms the universal dynamical features. Our finding reveals that the noise-induced defects scale linearly with the annealing time for fast noises, while in the presence of slow noises the noise-induced defects scale linearly with the square of the annealing time. The numerical simulations confirm that the optimal annealing time, at which the defect density is minimum, scales linearly in logarithmic scale with the total noise power having different exponents for fast and slow noises.
We present here our study of the adiabatic quantum dynamics of a random Ising chain across its quantum critical point. The model investigated is an Ising chain in a transverse field with disorder present both in the exchange coupling and in the transverse field. The transverse field term is proportional to a function $\ensuremath{\Gamma}(t)$ which, as in the Kibble-Zurek mechanism, is linearly reduced to zero in time with a rate ${\ensuremath{\tau}}^{\ensuremath{-}1}$, $\ensuremath{\Gamma}(t)=\ensuremath{-}t∕\ensuremath{\tau}$, starting at $t=\ensuremath{-}\ensuremath{\infty}$ from the quantum disordered phase $(\ensuremath{\Gamma}=\ensuremath{\infty})$ and ending at t=0t=0t=0 in the classical ferromagnetic phase $(\ensuremath{\Gamma}=0)$. We first analyze the distribution of the gaps, occurring at the critical point ${\ensuremath{\Gamma}}_{c}=1$, which are relevant for breaking the adiabaticity of the dynamics. We then present extensive numerical simulations for the residual energy Eres{E}_{\mathrm{res}}Eres​ and density of defects ${\ensuremath{\rho}}_{k}$ at the end of the annealing, as a function of the annealing inverse rate $\ensuremath{\tau}$. Both the average ${E}_{\mathrm{res}}(\ensuremath{\tau})$ and ${\ensuremath{\rho}}_{k}(\ensuremath{\tau})$ are found to behave logarithmically for large $\ensuremath{\tau}$, but with different exponents, $[{E}_{\mathrm{res}}(\ensuremath{\tau})∕L{]}_{\mathrm{av}}\ensuremath{\sim}1∕{\mathrm{ln}}^{\ensuremath{\zeta}}(\ensuremath{\tau})$ with $\ensuremath{\zeta}\ensuremath{\approx}3.4$, and $[{\ensuremath{\rho}}_{k}(\ensuremath{\tau}){]}_{\mathrm{av}}\ensuremath{\sim}1∕{\mathrm{ln}}^{2}(\ensuremath{\tau})$. We propose a mechanism for $1∕{\mathrm{ln}}^{2}\ensuremath{\tau}$ behavior of $[{\ensuremath{\rho}}_{k}{]}_{\mathrm{av}}$ based on the Landau-Zener tunneling theory and on a Fisher's-type real-space renormalization group analysis of the relevant gaps. The model proposed shows therefore a paradigmatic example of how an adiabatic quantum computation can become very slow when disorder is at play, even in the absence of any source of frustration.