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Impact of non-equilibrium fluctuations on pre-thermal dynamical phase transitions in interacting spin chains

Alessio Lerose, Bojan Žunkovič, Jamir Marino, Andrea Gambassi, Alessandro Silva

Published Jul 25, 2018• 1 citation
OpenAlex

Abstract

We study the non-equilibrium phase diagram and the dynamical phase transitions occurring during the pre-thermalization of non-integrable quantum spin chains, subject to either quantum quenches or linear ramps of a relevant control parameter. We consider spin systems in which long-range ferromagnetic interactions compete with short-range, integrability-breaking terms. We capture the pre-thermal stages of the non-equilibrium evolution via a time-dependent spin wave expansion at leading order in the spin waves density. In order to access regimes with strong integrability breaking, instead, we perform numerical simulations based on the time-dependent variational principle with matrix product states. By investigating a large class of quantum spin models, we demonstrate that non-equilibrium fluctuations can significantly affect the dynamics near critical points of the phase diagram, resulting in a chaotic evolution of the collective order parameter, akin to the dynamics of a classical particle in a multiple-well potential subject to quantum friction. We also elucidate the signature of this novel dynamical phase on the time-dependent correlation functions of the local order parameter. We finally establish a connection with the notion of dynamical quantum phase transition associated with a possible non-analytic behavior of the return probability amplitude, or Loschmidt echo, showing that the latter displays cusps whenever the order parameter vanishes during its real-time evolution.

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We study the non-equilibrium phase diagram and the dynamical phase transitions occurring during the pre-thermalization of non-integrable quantum spin chains, subject to either quantum quenches or linear ramps of a relevant control parameter. We consider spin systems in which long-range ferromagnetic interactions compete with short-range, integrability-breaking terms. We capture the pre-thermal stages of the non-equilibrium evolution via a time-dependent spin wave expansion at leading order in the spin waves density. In order to access regimes with strong integrability breaking, instead, we perform numerical simulations based on the time-dependent variational principle with matrix product states. By investigating a large class of quantum spin models, we demonstrate that non-equilibrium fluctuations can significantly affect the dynamics near critical points of the phase diagram, resulting in a chaotic evolution of the collective order parameter, akin to the dynamics of a classical particle in a multiple-well potential subject to quantum friction. We also elucidate the signature of this novel dynamical phase on the time-dependent correlation functions of the local order parameter. We finally establish a connection with the notion of dynamical quantum phase transition associated with a possible non-analytic behavior of the return probability amplitude, or Loschmidt echo, showing that the latter displays cusps whenever the order parameter vanishes during its real-time evolution.
We study the nonequilibrium phase diagram and the dynamical phase transitions occurring during the prethermalization of nonintegrable quantum spin chains, subject to either quantum quenches or linear ramps of a relevant control parameter. We consider spin systems in which long-range ferromagnetic interactions compete with short-range, integrability-breaking terms. We capture the prethermal stages of the nonequilibrium evolution via a time-dependent spin-wave expansion at leading order in the spin-wave density. In order to access regimes with strong integrability breaking, instead, we perform numerical simulations based on the time-dependent variational principle with matrix product states. By investigating a large class of quantum spin models, we demonstrate that nonequilibrium fluctuations can significantly affect the dynamics near critical points of the phase diagram, resulting in a chaotic evolution of the collective order parameter, akin to the dynamics of a classical particle in a multiple-well potential subject to quantum friction. We also elucidate the signature of this novel dynamical phase on the time-dependent correlation functions of the local order parameter. We finally establish a connection with the notion of dynamical quantum phase transition associated with a possible nonanalytic behavior of the return probability amplitude, or Loschmidt echo, showing that the latter displays cusps whenever the order parameter vanishes during its real-time evolution.
In recent years, dynamical phase transitions and out-of-equilibrium criticality have been at the forefront of ultracold gases and condensed matter research. Whereas universality and scaling are established topics in equilibrium quantum many-body physics, out-of-equilibrium extensions of such concepts still leave much to be desired. Using exact diagonalization and the time-dependent variational principle in uniform matrix product states, we calculate the time evolution of the local order parameter and Loschmidt return rate in transverse-field Ising chains with antiferromagnetic power law-decaying interactions, and map out the corresponding rich dynamical phase diagram. Anomalous cusps in the return rate, which are ubiquitous at small quenches within the ordered phase in the case of ferromagnetic long-range interactions, are absent within the accessible timescales of our simulations in the antiferromagnetic case, showing that long-range interactions are not a sufficient condition for their appearance. We attribute this to much weaker domain-wall binding in the antiferromagnetic case. For quenches across the quantum critical point, regular cusps appear in the return rate and connect to the local order parameter changing sign, indicating the concurrence of two major concepts of dynamical phase transitions. Our results consolidate conclusions of previous works that a necessary condition for the appearance of anomalous cusps in the return rate after quenches within the ordered phase is for topologically trivial local spin flips to be the energetically dominant excitations in the spectrum of the quench Hamiltonian. Our findings are readily accessible in modern trapped-ion setups and we outline the associated experimental considerations.
We investigate the robustness of a dynamical phase transition against quantum fluctuations by studying the impact of a ferromagnetic nearest-neighbor spin interaction in one spatial dimension on the nonequilibrium dynamical phase diagram of the fully connected quantum Ising model. In particular, we focus on the transient dynamics after a quantum quench and study the prethermal state via a combination of analytic time-dependent spin wave theory and numerical methods based on matrix product states. We find that, upon increasing the strength of the quantum fluctuations, the dynamical critical point fans out into a chaotic dynamical phase within which the asymptotic ordering is characterized by strong sensitivity to the parameters and initial conditions. We argue that such a phenomenon is general, as it arises from the impact of quantum fluctuations on the mean-field out of equilibrium dynamics of any system which exhibits a broken discrete symmetry.
We analytically and numerically study the Loschmidt echo and the dynamical order parameters in a spin chain with a deconfined phase transition between a dimerized state and a ferromagnetic phase. For quenches from a dimerized state to a ferromagnetic phase, we find that the model can exhibit a dynamical quantum phase transition characterized by an associating dimerized order parameter. In particular, when quenching the system from the Majumdar-Ghosh state to the ferromagnetic Ising state, we find an exact mapping into the classical Ising chain for a quench from the paramagnetic phase to the classical Ising phase by analytically calculating the Loschmidt echo and the dynamical order parameters. By contrast, for quenches from a ferromagnetic state to a dimerized state, the system relaxes very fast so that the dynamical quantum transition may exist on only a short timescale. We reveal that the dynamical quantum phase transition can occur in systems with two broken symmetry phases and the quench dynamics may be independent of equilibrium phase transitions.
Abstract We study the non-equilibrium phase diagram of a fully-connected Ising p-spin model, for generic p > 2, and investigate its robustness with respect to the inclusion of spin-wave fluctuations, resulting from a ferromagnetic, short-range spin interaction. In particular, we investigate the dynamics of the mean-field model after a quantum quench: we observe a new dynamical phase transition which is either first or second order depending on the even or odd parity of p, in stark contrast with its thermal counterpart which is first order for all p. The dynamical phase diagram is qualitatively modified by the fluctuations introduced by a short-range interaction which drive the system always towards various prethermal paramagnetic phases determined by the strength of time dependent fluctuations of the magnetization.
Using an infinite matrix product state (iMPS) technique based on the time-dependent variational principle (TDVP), we study two major types of dynamical phase transitions (DPT) in the one-dimensional transverse-field Ising model (TFIM) with long-range power-law ($\ensuremath{\propto}1/{r}^{\ensuremath{\alpha}}$ with rrr interspin distance) interactions out of equilibrium in the thermodynamic limit---DPT-I: based on an order parameter in a (quasi-)steady state, and DPT-II: based on nonanalyticities (cusps) in the Loschmidt-echo return rate. We construct the corresponding rich dynamical phase diagram, while considering different quench initial conditions. We find a nontrivial connection between both types of DPT based on their critical lines. Moreover, and very interestingly, we detect a new DPT-II dynamical phase in a certain range of interaction exponent $\ensuremath{\alpha}$, characterized by what we call anomalous cusps that are distinct from the regular cusps usually associated with DPT-II. Our results provide the characterization of experimentally accessible signatures of the dynamical phases studied in this work.