No Arabic abstract
A unified description of i) classical phase transitions and their remnants in finite systems and ii) quantum phase transitions is presented. The ensuing discussion relies on the interplay between, on the one hand, the thermodynamic concepts of temperature and specific heat and on the other, the quantal ones of coupling strengths in the Hamiltonian. Our considerations are illustrated in an exactly solvable model of Plastino and Moszkowski [Il Nuovo Cimento {bf 47}, 470 (1978)].
In this article we provide a review of geometrical methods employed in the analysis of quantum phase transitions and non-equilibrium dissipative phase transitions. After a pedagogical introduction to geometric phases and geometric information in the characterisation of quantum phase transitions, we describe recent developments of geometrical approaches based on mixed-state generalisation of the Berry-phase, i.e. the Uhlmann geometric phase, for the investigation of non-equilibrium steady-state quantum phase transitions (NESS-QPTs ). Equilibrium phase transitions fall invariably into two markedly non-overlapping categories: classical phase transitions and quantum phase transitions, whereas in NESS-QPTs this distinction may fade off. The approach described in this review, among other things, can quantitatively assess the quantum character of such critical phenomena. This framework is applied to a paradigmatic class of lattice Fermion systems with local reservoirs, characterised by Gaussian non-equilibrium steady states. The relations between the behaviour of the geometric phase curvature, the divergence of the correlation length, the character of the criticality and the gap - either Hamiltonian or dissipative - are reviewed.
We study the quantum fidelity approach to characterize thermal phase transitions. Specifically, we focus on the mixed-state fidelity induced by a perturbation in temperature. We consider the behavior of fidelity in two types of second-order thermal phase transitions (based on the type of non-analiticity of free energy), and we find that usual fidelity criteria for identifying critical points is more applicable to the case of $lambda$ transitions (divergent second derivatives of free energy). Our study also reveals limitations of the fidelity approach: sensitivity to high temperature thermal fluctuations that wash out information about the transition, and inability of fidelity to distinguish between crossovers and proper phase transitions. In spite of these limitations, however, we find that fidelity remains a good pre-criterion for testing thermal phase transitions, which we use to analyze the non-zero temperature phase diagram of the Lipkin-Meshkov-Glick model.
Phase transitions have recently been formulated in the time domain of quantum many-body systems, a phenomenon dubbed dynamical quantum phase transitions (DQPTs), whose phenomenology is often divided in two types. One refers to distinct phases according to long-time averaged order parameters, while the other is focused on the non-analytical behavior emerging in the rate function of the Loschmidt echo. Here we show that such DQPTs can be found in systems with few degrees of freedom, i.e. they can take place without resorting to the traditional thermodynamic limit. We illustrate this by showing the existence of the two types of DQPTs in a quantum Rabi model -- a system involving a spin-$frac{1}{2}$ and a bosonic mode. The dynamical criticality appears in the limit of an infinitely large ratio of the spin frequency with respect to the bosonic one. We determine its dynamical phase diagram and study the long-time averaged order parameters, whose semiclassical approximation yields a jump at the transition point. We find the critical times at which the rate function becomes non-analytical, showing its associated critical exponent as well as the corrections introduced by a finite frequency ratio. Our results open the door for the study of DQPTs without the need to scale up the number of components, thus allowing for their investigation in well controllable systems.
We present a formulation for investigating quench dynamics across quantum phase transitions in the presence of decoherence. We formulate decoherent dynamics induced by continuous quantum non-demolition measurements of the instantaneous Hamiltonian. We generalize the well-studied universal Kibble-Zurek behavior for linear temporal drive across the critical point. We identify a strong decoherence regime wherein the decoherence time is shorter than the standard correlation time, which varies as the inverse gap above the groundstate. In this regime, we find that the freeze-out time $bar{t}simtau^{{2 u z}/({1+2 u z})}$ for when the system falls out of equilibrium and the associated freeze-out length $bar{xi}simtau^{ u/({1+2 u z})}$ show power-law scaling with respect to the quench rate $1/tau$, where the exponents depend on the correlation length exponent $ u$ and the dynamical exponent $z$ associated with the transition. The universal exponents differ from those of standard Kibble-Zurek scaling. We explicitly demonstrate this scaling behavior in the instance of a topological transition in a Chern insulator system. We show that the freeze-out time scale can be probed from the relaxation of the Hall conductivity. Furthermore, on introducing disorder to break translational invariance, we demonstrate how quenching results in regions of imbalanced excitation density characterized by an emergent length scale which also shows universal scaling. We perform numerical simulations to confirm our analytical predictions and corroborate the scaling arguments that we postulate as universal to a host of systems.
We analyze ground-state behaviors of fidelity susceptibility (FS) and show that the FS has its own distinct dimension instead of real systems dimension in general quantum phases. The scaling relation of the FS in quantum phase transitions (QPTs) is then established on more general grounds. Depending on whether the FSs dimensions of two neighboring quantum phases are the same or not, we are able to classify QPTs into two distinct types. For the latter type, the change in the FSs dimension is a characteristic that separates two phases. As a non-trivial application to the Kitaev honeycomb model, we find that the FS is proportional to $L^2ln L$ in the gapless phase, while $L^2$ in the gapped phase. Therefore, the extra dimension of $ln L$ can be used as a characteristic of the gapless phase.