No Arabic abstract
Phase transitions to absorbing states are among the simplest examples of critical phenomena out of equilibrium. The characteristic feature of these models is the presence of a fluctuationless configuration which the dynamics cannot leave, which has proved a rather stringent requirement in experiments. Recently, a proposal to seek such transitions in highly tuneable systems of cold atomic gases offers to probe this physics and, at the same time, to investigate the robustness of these transitions to quantum coherent effects. Here we specifically focus on the interplay between classical and quantum fluctuations in a simple driven open quantum model which, in the classical limit, reproduces a contact process, which is known to undergo a continuous transition in the directed percolation universality class. We derive an effective long-wavelength field theory for the present class of open spin systems and show that, due to quantum fluctuations, the nature of the transition changes from second to first order, passing through a bicritical point which appears to belong instead to the tricritical directed percolation class.
Recent experimental developments in diverse areas - ranging from cold atomic gases over light-driven semiconductors to microcavity arrays - move systems into the focus, which are located on the interface of quantum optics, many-body physics and statistical mechanics. They share in common that coherent and driven-dissipative quantum dynamics occur on an equal footing, creating genuine non-equilibrium scenarios without immediate counterpart in condensed matter. This concerns both their non-thermal flux equilibrium states, as well as their many-body time evolution. It is a challenge to theory to identify novel instances of universal emergent macroscopic phenomena, which are tied unambiguously and in an observable way to the microscopic drive conditions. In this review, we discuss some recent results in this direction. Moreover, we provide a systematic introduction to the open system Keldysh functional integral approach, which is the proper technical tool to accomplish a merger of quantum optics and many-body physics, and leverages the power of modern quantum field theory to driven open quantum systems.
We introduce a discrete-time quantum dynamics on a two-dimensional lattice that describes the evolution of a $1+1$-dimensional spin system. The underlying quantum map is constructed such that the reduced state at each time step is separable. We show that for long times this state becomes stationary and displays a continuous phase transition in the density of excited spins. This phenomenon can be understood through a connection to the so-called Domany-Kinzel automaton, which implements a classical non-equilibrium process that features a transition to an absorbing state. Near the transition density-density correlations become long-ranged, but interestingly the same is the case for quantum correlations despite the separability of the stationary state. We quantify quantum correlations through the local quantum uncertainty and show that in some cases they may be determined experimentally solely by measuring expectation values of classical observables. This work is inspired by recent experimental progress in the realization of Rydberg lattice quantum simulators, which - in a rather natural way - permit the realization of conditional quantum gates underlying the discrete-time dynamics discussed here.
The Berezinskii-Kosterlitz-Thouless mechanism, in which a phase transition is mediated by the proliferation of topological defects, governs the critical behaviour of a wide range of equilibrium two-dimensional systems with a continuous symmetry, ranging from superconducting thin films to two-dimensional Bose fluids, such as liquid helium and ultracold atoms. We show here that this phenomenon is not restricted to thermal equilibrium, rather it survives more generally in a dissipative highly non-equilibrium system driven into a steady-state. By considering a light-matter superfluid of polaritons, in the so-called optical parametric oscillator regime, we demonstrate that it indeed undergoes a vortex binding-unbinding phase transition. Yet, the exponent of the power-law decay of the first order correlation function in the (algebraically) ordered phase can exceed the equilibrium upper limit -- a surprising occurrence, which has also been observed in a recent experiment. Thus we demonstrate that the ordered phase is somehow more robust against the quantum fluctuations of driven systems than thermal ones in equilibrium.
Isotropic scattering in various spatial dimensions is considered for arbitrary finite-range potentials using non-relativistic effective field theory. With periodic boundary conditions, compactifications from a box to a plane and to a wire, and from a plane to a wire, are considered by matching S-matrix elements. The problem is greatly simplified by regulating the ultraviolet divergences using dimensional regularization with minimal subtraction. General relations among (all) effective-range parameters in the various dimensions are derived, and the dependence of bound states on changing dimensionality are considered. Generally, it is found that compactification binds the two-body system, even if the uncompactified system is unbound. For instance, compactification from a box to a plane gives rise to a bound state with binding momentum given by $ln left({scriptstyle frac{1}{2}}left(3+sqrt{5} right) right)$ in units of the inverse compactification length. This binding momentum is universal in the sense that it does not depend on the two-body interaction in the box. When the two-body system in the box is at unitarity, the S-matrices of the compactified two-body system on the plane and on the wire are given exactly as universal functions of the compactification length
We discuss high-order calculations in perturbative effective field theory for fermions at low energy scales. The Fermi-momentum or $k_{rm F} a_s$ expansion for the ground-state energy of the dilute Fermi gas is calculated to fourth order, both in cutoff regularization and in dimensional regularization. For the case of spin one-half fermions we find from a Bayesian analysis that the expansion is well-converged at this order for ${| k_{rm F} a_s | lesssim 0.5}$. Further, we show that Pad{e}-Borel resummations can improve the convergence for ${| k_{rm F} a_s | lesssim 1}$. Our results provide important constraints for nonperturbative calculations of ultracold atoms and dilute neutron matter.