No Arabic abstract
Stochastic processes with absorbing states feature remarkable examples of non-equilibrium universal phenomena. While a broad understanding has been progressively established in the classical regime, relatively little is known about the behavior of these non-equilibrium systems in the presence of quantum fluctuations. Here we theoretically address such a scenario in an open quantum spin model which in its classical limit undergoes a directed percolation phase transition. By mapping the problem to a non-equilibrium field theory, we show that the introduction of quantum fluctuations stemming from coherent, rather than statistical, spin-flips alters the nature of the transition such that it becomes first-order. In the intermediate regime, where classical and quantum dynamics compete on equal terms, we highlight the presence of a bicritical point with universal features different from the directed percolation class in low dimension. We finally propose how this physics could be explored within gases of interacting atoms excited to Rydberg states.
The effects of quenched disorder on nonequilibrium phase transitions in the directed percolation universality class are revisited. Using a strong-disorder energy-space renormalization group, it is shown that for any amount of disorder the critical behavior is controlled by an infinite-randomness fixed point in the universality class of the random transverse-field Ising models. The experimental relevance of our results are discussed.
Phase transitions in dissipative quantum systems are intriguing because they are induced by the interplay between coherent quantum and incoherent classical fluctuations. Here, we investigate the crossover from a quantum to a classical absorbing phase transition arising in the quantum contact process (QCP). The Lindblad equation contains two parameters, $omega$ and $kappa$, which adjust the contributions of the quantum and classical effects, respectively. We find that in one dimension when the QCP starts from a homogeneous state with all active sites, there exists a critical line in the region $0 le kappa < kappa_*$ along which the exponent $alpha$ (which is associated with the density of active sites) decreases continuously from a quantum to the classical directed percolation (DP) value. This behavior suggests that the quantum coherent effect remains to some extent near $kappa=0$. However, when the QCP in one dimension starts from a heterogeneous state with all inactive sites except for one active site, all the critical exponents have the classical DP values for $kappa ge 0$. In two dimensions, anomalous crossover behavior does not occur, and classical DP behavior appears in the entire region of $kappa ge 0$ regardless of the initial configuration. Neural network machine learning is used to identify the critical line and determine the correlation length exponent. Numerical simulations using the quantum jump Monte Carlo technique and tensor network method are performed to determine all the other critical exponents of the QCP.
We introduce and solve a model of hardcore particles on a one dimensional periodic lattice which undergoes an active-absorbing state phase transition at finite density. In this model an occupied site is defined to be active if its left neighbour is occupied and the right neighbour is vacant. Particles from such active sites hop stochastically to their right. We show that, both the density of active sites and the survival probability vanish as the particle density is decreased below half. The critical exponents and spatial correlations of the model are calculated exactly using the matrix product ansatz. Exact analytical study of several variations of the model reveals that these non-equilibrium phase transitions belong to a new universality class different from the generic active-absorbing-state phase transition, namely directed percolation.
We investigate the behavior of nonequilibrium phase transitions under the influence of disorder that locally breaks the symmetry between two symmetrical macroscopic absorbing states. In equilibrium systems such random-field disorder destroys the phase transition in low dimensions by preventing spontaneous symmetry breaking. In contrast, we show here that random-field disorder fails to destroy the nonequilibrium phase transition of the one- and two-dimensional generalized contact process. Instead, it modifies the dynamics in the symmetry-broken phase. Specifically, the dynamics in the one-dimensional case is described by a Sinai walk of the domain walls between two different absorbing states. In the two-dimensional case, we map the dynamics onto that of the well studied low-temperature random-field Ising model. We also study the critical behavior of the nonequilibrium phase transition and characterize its universality class in one dimension. We support our results by large-scale Monte Carlo simulations, and we discuss the applicability of our theory to other systems.
We study diffusion of hardcore particles on a one dimensional periodic lattice subjected to a constraint that the separation between any two consecutive particles does not increase beyond a fixed value $(n+1);$ initial separation larger than $(n+1)$ can however decrease. These models undergo an absorbing state phase transition when the conserved particle density of the system falls bellow a critical threshold $rho_c= 1/(n+1).$ We find that $phi_k$s, the density of $0$-clusters ($0$ representing vacancies) of size $0le k<n,$ vanish at the transition point along with activity density $rho_a$. The steady state of these models can be written in matrix product form to obtain analytically the static exponents $beta_k= n-k, u=1=eta$ corresponding to each $phi_k$. We also show from numerical simulations that starting from a natural condition, $phi_k(t)$s decay as $t^{-alpha_k}$ with $alpha_k= (n-k)/2$ even though other dynamic exponents $ u_t=2=z$ are independent of $k$; this ensures the validity of scaling laws $beta= alpha u_t,$ $ u_t = z u$.