We show that non-Hermitian biorthogonal many-body phase transitions can be characterized by the enhanced decay of Loschmidt echo. The quantum criticality is numerically investigated in a non-Hermitian transverse field Ising model by performing the fi
nite-size dynamical scaling of Loschmidt echo. We determine the equilibrium correlation length critical exponents that are consistent with previous results from the exact diagonalization. More importantly, we introduce a simple method to detect quantum phase transitions with the short-time average of rate function motivated by the critically enhanced decay behavior of Loschmidt echo. Our studies show how to detect equilibrium many-body phase transitions with biorthogonal Loschmidt echo that can be observed in future experiments via quantum dynamics after a quench.
Recently, it has been proposed that higher-spin analogues of the Kitaev interactions $K>0$ may also occur in a number of materials with strong Hunds and spin-orbit coupling. In this work, we use Lanczos diagonalization and density matrix renormalizat
ion group methods to investigate numerically the $S=1$ Kitaev-Heisenberg model. The ground-state phase diagram and quantum phase transitions are investigated by employing local and nonlocal spin correlations. We identified two ordered phases at negative Heisenberg coupling $J<0$: a~ferromagnetic phase with $langle S_i^zS_{i+1}^zrangle>0$ and an intermediate left-left-right-right phase with $langle S_i^xS_{i+1}^xrangle eq 0$. A~quantum spin liquid is stable near the Kitaev limit, while a topological Haldane phase is found for $J>0$.
We develop the perturbation theory of the fidelity susceptibility in biorthogonal bases for arbitrary interacting non-Hermitian many-body systems with real eigenvalues. The quantum criticality in the non-Hermitian transverse field Ising chain is inve
stigated by the second derivative of ground-state energy and the ground-state fidelity susceptibility. We show that the system undergoes a second-order phase transition with the Ising universal class by numerically computing the critical points and the critical exponents from the finite-size scaling theory. Interestingly, our results indicate that the biorthogonal quantum phase transitions are described by the biorthogonal fidelity susceptibility instead of the conventional fidelity susceptibility.
Motivated by the experiment [St-Jean {it et al}., Nature Photon. {bf 11}, 651 (2017)] on topological phases with collective photon modes in a zigzag chain of polariton micropillars, we study spinless $p$-orbital fermions with local interorbital hoppi
ngs and repulsive interactions between $p_x$ and $p_y$ bands in zigzag optical lattices. We show that spinless $p$-band fermions in zigzag optical lattices can mimic the interacting Su-Schrieffer-Heeger model and the effective transverse field Ising model in the presence of local hoppings. We analytically and numerically discuss the ground-state phases and quantum phase transitions of the model. This work provides a simple scheme to simulate topological phases and the quench dynamics of many-body systems in optical lattices.
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 parameters. 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 only exist in a short time scale. We reveal that the dynamical quantum phase transition can occur in systems with two broken symmetry phases and the quench dynamics may be independent on equilibrium phase transitions.
Deconfined quantum critical point was proposed as a second-order quantum phase transition between two broken symmetry phases beyond the Landau-Ginzburg-Wilson paradigm. However, numerical studies cannot completely rule out a weakly first-order transi
tion because of strong violations of finite-size scaling. We demonstrate that the fidelity is a simple probe to study deconfined quantum critical point. We study the ground-state fidelity susceptibility close to the deconfined quantum critical point in a spin chain using the large-scale finite-size density matrix renormalization group method. We find that the finite-size scaling of the fidelity susceptibility obeys the conventional scaling behavior for continuous phase transitions, supporting the deconfined quantum phase transition is continuous. We numerically determine the deconfined quantum critical point and the associated correlation length critical exponent from the finite-size scaling theory of the fidelity susceptibility. Our results are consistent with recent results obtained directly from the matrix product states for infinite-size lattices using others observables. Our work provides a useful probe to study critical behaviors at deconfined quantum critical point from the concept of quantum information.
The out-of-time-ordered correlator (OTOC) is central to the understanding of information scrambling in quantum many-body systems. In this work, we show that the OTOC in a quantum many-body system close to its critical point obeys dynamical scaling la
ws which are specified by a few universal critical exponents of the quantum critical point. Such scaling laws of the OTOC imply a universal form for the butterfly velocity of a chaotic system in the quantum critical region and allow one to locate the quantum critical point and extract all universal critical exponents of the quantum phase transitions. We numerically confirm the universality of the butterfly velocity in a chaotic model, namely the transverse axial next-nearest-neighbor Ising model, and show the feasibility of extracting the critical properties of quantum phase transitions from OTOC using the Lipkin-Meshkov-Glick (LMG) model.
The concept of Floquet engineering is to subject a quantum system to time-periodic driving in such a way that it acquires interesting novel properties. It has been employed, for instance, for the realization of artificial magnetic fluxes in optical l
attices and, typically, it is based on two approximations. First, the driving frequency is assumed to be low enough to suppress resonant excitations to high-lying states above some energy gap separating a low energy subspace from excited states. Second, the driving frequency is still assumed to be large compared to the energy scales of the low-energy subspace, so that also resonant excitations within this space are negligible. Eventually, however, deviations from both approximations will lead to unwanted heating on a time scale $tau$. Using the example of a one-dimensional system of repulsively interacting bosons in a shaken optical lattice, we investigate the optimal frequency (window) that maximizes $tau$. As a main result, we find that, when increasing the lattice depth, $tau$ increases faster than the experimentally relevant time scale given by the tunneling time $hbar/J$, so that Floquet heating becomes suppressed.
