Dynamical phase transitions are defined as nonanalytic points of the large deviation function of current fluctuations. We show that for boundary-driven systems, many dynamical phase transitions can be identified using the geometrical structure of an effective potential of a Hamiltonian, recovered from the macroscopic fluctuation theory description. Using this method we identify new dynamical phase transitions that could not be recovered using existing perturbative methods. Moreover, using the Hamiltonian picture, an experimental scheme is suggested to demonstrate an analog of dynamical phase transitions in linear, rather than exponential, time.
We describe a geometric (or gravitational) analog of the Laughlin quasiholes in fractional quantum Hall states. Analogously to the quasiholes, these defects can be constructed by an insertion of an appropriate vertex operator into the conformal block representation of a trial wave function; however, unlike the quasiholes these defects are extrinsic and do not correspond to true excitations of the quantum fluid. We construct a wave function in the presence of such defects and explain how to assign an electric charge and a spin to each defect and calculate the adiabatic, non-Abelian statistics of the defects. The defects turn out to be equivalent to the genons in that their adiabatic exchange statistics can be described in terms of representations of the mapping class group of an appropriate higher genus Riemann surface. We present a general construction that, in principle, makes it possible to calculate the statistics of
Zn genons for any ``parent'' topological phase. We illustrate the construction on the example of the Laughlin state and perform an explicit calculation of the braiding matrices. In addition to non-Abelian statistics, geometric defects possess a universal Abelian overall phase, determined by the gravitational anomaly.