Motivated by experiments on splitting one-dimensional quasi-condensates, we study the statistics of the work done by a quantum quench in a bosonic system. We discuss the general features of the probability distribution of the work and focus on its behaviour at the lowest energy threshold, which develops an edge singularity. A formal connection between this probability distribution and the critical Casimir effect in thin classical films shows that certain features of the edge singularity are universal as the post-quench gap tends to zero. Our results are quantitatively illustrated by an exact calculation for non-interacting bosonic systems. The effects of finite system size, dimensionality, and non-zero initial temperature are discussed in detail.
We study the large deviations statistics of the intensive work done by changing globally a control parameter in a thermally isolated quantum many-body system. We show that, upon approaching a critical point, large deviations well below the mean work display universal features related to the critical Casimir effect in the corresponding classical system. Large deviations well above the mean are, instead, of quantum nature and not captured by the quantum-to-classical correspondence. For a bosonic system we show that in this latter regime a transition from exponential to power-law statistics, analogous to the equilibrium Bose-Einstein condensation, may occur depending on the parameters of the quench and on the spatial dimensionality.
