The evolution of the system of fermions with pairing under the action of a pulse (or a quench) of the external potential has been studied. In the dynamical regime the number of fermions oscillates (with beats) as a function of the duration of the pulse (or as a function of time for the quench) about the value determined by the magnitude of the pulse. Oscillations depend on the values of the potential and the pulse. The parameters of those oscillations permit one to determine characteristics of the dynamical quantum phase transitions, such as Fisher's zeros in one-dimensional systems. The effect is absent for zero pairing. In particular, the response of a topological superconductor to the pulse manifests dynamical oscillations, most pronounced for the range of parameters in which the topological superconductivity can occur. The response of Majorana edge states to the pulse is analyzed. The results are generalized for the bosonic system with pairing under the action of the pulse (quench).
The evolution of the system of fermions with pairing under the action of a pulse (or a quench) of the external potential has been studied. In the dynamical regime the number of fermions oscillates (with beats) as a function of the duration of the pulse (or as a function of time for the quench) about the value determined by the magnitude of the pulse. Oscillations depend on the values of the potential and the pulse. The parameters of those oscillations permit one to determine characteristics of the dynamical quantum phase transitions, such as Fisher's zeros in one-dimensional systems. The effect is absent for zero pairing. In particular, the response of a topological superconductor to the pulse manifests dynamical oscillations, most pronounced for the range of parameters in which the topological superconductivity can occur. The response of Majorana edge states to the pulse is analyzed. The results are generalized for the bosonic system with pairing under the action of the pulse (quench).
The nonequilibrium evolution of the system of two kinds of fermions under the action of a pulse of the external field has been studied. The number of fermions of each kind oscillates (with beats and decaying) as a function of the duration of the pulse about the value determined by the magnitude of the pulse, and as a function of the magnitude of the pulse. For low-dimensional systems those oscillations can serve as a non-zero-temperature manifestation of dynamical quantum phase transitions. The response of a Fermi gas or liquid in a tilted magnetic field, an edge state of a topological insulator, a quantum wire with spin-orbit coupling, and a dimerized spin-1/2 chain to the pulse can manifest such dynamical oscillations, which can be observed in experiments.
The fermionic and Majorana edge mode dynamics of various topological systems are compared, after a sudden global quench of the Hamiltonian parameters takes place. Attention is focused on the regimes where the survival probability of an edge state has oscillations either due to critical or off-critical quenches. The nature of the wave functions and the overlaps between the eigenstates of different points in parameter space determine the various types of behaviors, and the distinction due to the Majorana nature of the excitations plays a lesser role. Performing a sequence of quenches, it is shown that the edge states, including Majorana modes, may be switched off and on. Also, the generation of Majoranas due to quenching from a trivial phase is discussed.
We revisit the study of amplitude oscillations in a pair condensate of fermions after an interaction quench, and generalize it to nonzero temperature. For small variations of the order parameter, we show that the energy transfer during the quench determines both the asymptotic pseudo-equilibrated value of the order parameter and the magnitude of the oscillations, after multiplication by, respectively, the static response of the order parameter and spectral weight of the pair-breaking threshold. Since the energy transferred to the condensed pairs decreases with temperature as the superfluid contact, the oscillations eventually disappear at the critical temperature. For deeper quenches, we generalize the regimes of persistent oscillations and monotonic decay to nonzero temperatures, and explain how they become more abrupt and are more easily entered at high temperatures when the ratio of the initial to final gap either diverges, when quenching towards the normal phase, or tends to zero, when quenching towards the superfluid phase. Our results are directly relevant for existing and future experiments on the non-equilibrium evolution of Fermi superfluids near the phase transition.
Dynamical quantum phase transitions (DQPTs) manifested in the nonanalyticities in the temporal evolution of a closed quantum system generated by the time-independent final Hamiltonian, following a quench (or ramping) of a parameter of the Hamiltonian, is an emerging frontier of nonequilibrium quantum dynamics. We, here, introduce the notion of a dynamical topological order parameter (DTOP) that characterizes these DQPTs occurring in quenched (or ramped) two-dimensional closed quantum systems; this is quite a nontrivial generalization of the notion of DTOP introduced in Budich and Heyl [Phys. Rev. B 93, 085416 (2016)] for one-dimensional situations. This DTOP is obtained from the ``gauge-invariant'' Pancharatnam phase extracted from the Loschmidt overlap, i.e., the modulus of the overlap between the initially prepared state and its time-evolved counterpart reached following a temporal evolution generated by the time-independent final Hamiltonian. This generic proposal is illustrated considering DQPTs occurring in the subsequent temporal evolution following a sudden quench of the staggered mass of the topological Haldane model on a hexagonal lattice where it stays fixed to zero or unity and makes a discontinuous jump between these two values at critical times at which DQPTs occur. What is remarkable is that while the topology of the equilibrium model is characterized by the Chern number, the emergent topology associated with the DQPTs is characterized by a generalized winding number.
In the sequence of quenches to either nontopological phases or other topological phases, we study the stability of Majorana fermions at the edges of a two-dimensional topological superconductor with spin-orbit coupling and in the presence of a Zeeman term. Both instantaneous and slow quenches are considered. In the case of instantaneous quenches, the Majorana modes generally decay, but for a finite system there is a revival time that scales to infinity as the system size grows. Exceptions to this decaying behavior are found in some cases due to the presence of edge states with the same momentum in the final state. Quenches to a topological Z(2) phase reveal some robustness of the Majorana fermions in the sense that even though the survival probability of the Majorana state is small, it does not vanish. If the pairing is not aligned with the spin-orbit Rashba coupling, it is found that the Majorana fermions are fairly robust with a finite survival probability. It is also shown that the Chern number remains invariant after the quench, until the propagation of the mode along the transverse direction reaches the middle point, beyond which the Chern number fluctuates between increasing values. The effect of varying the rate of change in slow quenches is also analyzed. It is found that the defect production is nonuniversal and does not follow the Kibble-Zurek scaling with the quench rate, as obtained before for other systems with topological edge states.
We study the quench dynamics of a one-dimensional ultracold Fermi gas with synthetic spin-orbit coupling. At equilibrium, the ground state of the system can undergo a topological phase transition and become a topological superfluid with Majorana edge states. As the interaction is quenched near the topological phase boundary, we identify an interesting dynamical phase transition of the quenched state in the long-time limit, characterized by an abrupt change of the pairing gap at a critical quenched interaction strength. We further demonstrate the topological nature of this dynamical phase transition from edge-state analysis of the quenched states. Our findings provide interesting clues for the understanding of topological phase transitions in dynamical processes, and can be useful for the dynamical detection of Majorana edge states in corresponding systems.