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Critical dynamics and decoherence

Bogdan Damski, H. T. Quan, Wojciech Hubert Zurek

Published Jan 1, 2009• 0 citations
OpenAlex

Abstract

We study dynamics of decoherence in a generic model where the environment is driven and undergoes a quantum phase transition. We model the environment by the Ising chain in the transverse field, and assume that the decohering system is a central spin-1/2. We found that when the environment is quenched slowly through the critical point, the decoherence factor of the central spin undergoes rapid decay that encodes the critical exponents of the environment. We also found that decoherence in a non-equilibrated, kink-contaminated, environment can be stronger than in a vacuum one. We derived a remarkably simple analytical expression that describes post-transition decoherence and predicts periodicities involving all system parameters. This research connects the fields of decoherence, quantum phase transitions, and Kibble-Zurek non-equilibrium dynamics.

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We study dynamics of decoherence in a generic model where the environment is driven and undergoes a quantum phase transition. We model the environment by the Ising chain in the transverse field, and assume that the decohering system is a central spin-1/2. We found that when the environment is quenched slowly through the critical point, the decoherence factor of the central spin undergoes rapid decay that encodes the critical exponents of the environment. We also found that decoherence in a non-equilibrated, kink-contaminated, environment can be stronger than in a vacuum one. We derived a remarkably simple analytical expression that describes post-transition decoherence and predicts periodicities involving all system parameters. This research connects the fields of decoherence, quantum phase transitions, and Kibble-Zurek non-equilibrium dynamics.
We consider a linear quench from the paramagnetic to ferromagnetic phase in the quantum Ising chain interacting with a static spin environment. Both decoherence from the environment and nonadiabaticity of the evolution near a critical point excite the system from the final ferromagnetic ground state. For weak decoherence and relatively fast quenches the excitation energy, proportional to the number of kinks in the final state, decays like an inverse square root of a quench time, but slow transitions or strong decoherence makes it decay in a much slower logarithmic way. We also find that fidelity between the final ferromagnetic ground state and a final state after a quench decays exponentially with a size of a chain, with a decay rate proportional to average density of excited kinks and a proportionality factor evolving from 1.3 for weak decoherence and fast quenches to approximately 1 for slow transitions or strong decoherence. Simultaneously, correlations between kinks randomly distributed along the chain evolve from a near-crystalline antibunching to a Poissonian distribution of kinks in a number of isolated Anderson localization centers randomly scattered along the chain.
Quantum Ising model in one dimension is an exactly solvable example of a quantum phase transition. We investigate its behavior during a quench caused by a gradual turning off of the transverse bias field. The system is then driven at a fixed rate characterized by the quench time ${\ensuremath{\tau}}_{Q}$ across the critical point from a paramagnetic to ferromagnetic phase. In agreement with Kibble-Zurek mechanism (which recognizes that evolution is approximately adiabatic far away, but becomes approximately impulse sufficiently near the critical point), quantum state of the system after the transition exhibits a characteristic correlation length $\stackrel{\ifmmode \hat{}\else \^{}\fi{}}{\ensuremath{\xi}}$ proportional to the square root of the quench time ${\ensuremath{\tau}}_{Q}$: $\stackrel{\ifmmode \hat{}\else \^{}\fi{}}{\ensuremath{\xi}}=\sqrt{{\ensuremath{\tau}}_{Q}}$. The inverse of this correlation length is known to determine average density of defects (e.g., kinks) after the transition. In this paper, we show that this same $\stackrel{\ifmmode \hat{}\else \^{}\fi{}}{\ensuremath{\xi}}$ controls the entropy of entanglement, e.g., entropy of a block of LLL spins that are entangled with the rest of the system after the transition from the paramagnetic ground state induced by the quench. For large LLL, this entropy saturates at $\frac{1}{6}\phantom{\rule{0.2em}{0ex}}{\mathrm{log}}_{2}\phantom{\rule{0.2em}{0ex}}\stackrel{\ifmmode \hat{}\else \^{}\fi{}}{\ensuremath{\xi}}$, as might have been expected from the Kibble-Zurek mechanism. Close to the critical point, the entropy saturates when the block size $L\ensuremath{\approx}\stackrel{\ifmmode \hat{}\else \^{}\fi{}}{\ensuremath{\xi}}$, but---in the subsequent evolution in the ferromagnetic phase---a somewhat larger length scale $l=\sqrt{{\ensuremath{\tau}}_{Q}}\phantom{\rule{0.2em}{0ex}}\mathrm{ln}\phantom{\rule{0.2em}{0ex}}{\ensuremath{\tau}}_{Q}$ develops as a result of a dephasing process that can be regarded as a quantum analog of phase ordering, and the entropy saturates when $L\ensuremath{\approx}l$. We also study the spin-spin correlation using both analytic methods and real time simulations with the Vidal algorithm. We find that at an instant when quench is crossing the critical point, ferromagnetic correlations decay exponentially with the dynamical correlation length $\stackrel{\ifmmode \hat{}\else \^{}\fi{}}{\ensuremath{\xi}}$, but (as for entropy of entanglement) in the following evolution length scale lll gradually develops. The correlation function becomes oscillatory at distances less than this scale. However, both the wavelength and the correlation length of these oscillations are still determined by $\stackrel{\ifmmode \hat{}\else \^{}\fi{}}{\ensuremath{\xi}}$. We also derive probability distribution for the number of kinks in a finite spin chain after the transition.
We study the scaling of the decoherence factor of a qubit (spin-1/21/21/2) using the central spin model in which the central spin (qubit) is globally coupled to a transverse XY spin chain. The aim here is to study the nonequilibrium generation of decoherence when the spin chain is driven across (along) quantum critical points (lines) and derive the scaling of the decoherence factor in terms of the driving rate and some of the exponents associated with the quantum critical points. Our studies show that the scaling of the logarithm of the decoherence factor is identical to that of the defect density in the final state of the spin chain following a quench across isolated quantum critical points for both linear and nonlinear variations of a parameter, even if the defect density may not satisfy the standard Kibble-Zurek scaling. However, one finds an interesting deviation when the spin chain is driven along a critical line. Our analytical predictions are in complete agreement with numerical results. Our study, though limited to integrable two-level systems, points to the existence of a universality in the scaling of the decoherence factor which is not necessarily identical to the scaling of the defect density.
We review quantum phase transitions of spin systems in transverse magnetic fields taking the examples of the spin-1/2 Ising and XY models in a transverse field. Beginning with an overview of quantum phase transitions, we introduce a number of model Hamiltonians. We provide exact solutions in one spatial dimension connecting them to conformal field theoretical studies. We also discuss Kitaev models and some other exactly solvable spin systems. Studies of quantum phase transitions in the presence of quenched randomness and with frustrating interactions are presented in detail. We discuss novel phenomena like Griffiths-McCoy singularities. We then turn to more recent topics like information theoretic measures of the quantum phase transitions in these models such as concurrence, entanglement entropy, quantum discord and quantum fidelity. We then focus on non-equilibrium dynamics of a variety of transverse field systems across quantum critical points and lines. After mentioning rapid quenching studies, we dwell on slow dynamics and discuss the Kibble-Zurek scaling for the defect density following a quench across critical points and its modifications for quenching across critical lines, gapless regions and multicritical points. Topics like the role of different quenching schemes, local quenching, quenching of models with random interactions and quenching of a spin chain coupled to a heat bath are touched upon. The connection between non-equilibrium dynamics and quantum information theoretic measures is presented at some length. We indicate the connection between Kibble-Zurek scaling and adiabatic evolution of a state as well as the application of adiabatic dynamics as a tool of a quantum optimization technique known as quantum annealing. The final section is dedicated to a detailed discussion on recent experimental studies of transverse Ising-like systems.
Understanding how noise influences nonequilibrium quantum critical dynamics is essential for both fundamental physics and the development of practical quantum technologies. While the quantum Kibble-Zurek (QKZ) mechanism predicts universal scaling during quenches across a critical point, real quantum systems exhibit complex decoherence that can substantially modify these behaviors, ranging from altering critical scaling to completely suppressing it. By considering a specific case of nondemolishing noise, we first show how decoherence can reshape universal scaling and verify these theoretical predictions using numerical simulations of spin chains across a wide range of noise strengths. Then, we study linear quenches in the transverse-field Ising model on IBM superconducting processors where the noise model is unknown. Using large system sizes of 80-120 qubits, we measure equal-time connected correlations, defect densities, and excess energies across various quench times. Surprisingly, unlike earlier observations where noise-induced defect production masked universal behavior at long times, we observe clear scaling relations, pointing towards persistent universal structure shaped by decoherence. The extracted scaling exponents differ from both ideal QKZ predictions and analytic results for simplified noise models, suggesting the emergence of a distinct noise-influenced universality regime. Our results, therefore, point toward the possibility of using universal dynamical scaling as a high-level descriptor of quantum hardware, complementary to conventional gate-level performance metrics.
In this paper, we study the dynamical processes of quantum coherence and correlations for two central qubits system coupled with a transverse Ising spin chain. Suppose the initial state of quantum system is the Werner state and the initial state of environment is the ground state of spin chain, and the corresponding time evolution operator, decoherence factor and reduced density matrix are given. We deduce the analytical expressions of evolution of quantum coherence, entanglement and quantum discord. We find that when the spin chain undergoes quantum phase transition (QPT), the entanglement vanished at time [Formula: see text], and the coherence and discord vanished when the decoherence factor decayed to zero. Besides, we also find that the environmental scale N, coupling strength g and parameter P of Werner state do not change the evolution rules of quantum correlation, but accelerate their decay rate with these parameters’ increase.