We discuss the quench dynamics near a quantum critical point focusing on the sine-Gordon model as a primary example. We suggest a unified approach to sudden and slow quenches, where the tuning parameter $lambda(t)$ changes in time as $lambda(t)sim up
silon t^r$, based on the adiabatic expansion of the excitation probability in powers of $upsilon$. We show that the universal scaling of the excitation probability can be understood through the singularity of the generalized adiabatic susceptibility $chi_{2r+2}(lambda)$, which for sudden quenches ($r=0$) reduces to the fidelity susceptibility. In turn this class of susceptibilities is expressed through the moments of the connected correlation function of the quench operator. We analyze the excitations created after a sudden quench of the cosine potential using a combined approach of form-factors expansion and conformal perturbation theory for the low-energy and high-energy sector respectively. We find the general scaling laws for the probability of exciting the system, the density of excited quasiparticles, the entropy and the heat generated after the quench. In the two limits where the sine-Gordon model maps to hard core bosons and free massive fermions we provide the exact solutions for the quench dynamics and discuss the finite temperature generalizations.
We study the dynamical response of a system to a sudden change of the tuning parameter $lambda$ starting (or ending) at the quantum critical point. In particular we analyze the scaling of the excitation probability, number of excited quasiparticles,
heat and entropy with the quench amplitude and the system size. We extend the analysis to quenches with arbitrary power law dependence on time of the tuning parameter, showing a close connection between the scaling behavior of these quantities with the singularities of the adiabatic susceptibilities of order $m$ at the quantum critical point, where $m$ is related to the power of the quench. Precisely for sudden quenches the relevant susceptibility of the second order coincides with the fidelity susceptibility. We discuss the generalization of the scaling laws to the finite temperature quenches and show that the statistics of the low-energy excitations becomes important. We illustrate the relevance of those results for cold atoms experiments.
We propose a new method for detecting paired states in either bosonic or fermionic systems using interference experiments with independent or weakly coupled low dimensional systems. We demonstrate that our method can be used to detect both the FFLO a
nd the d-wave paired states of fermions, as well as quasicondensates of singlet pairs for polar F=1 atoms in two dimensional systems. We discuss how this method can be used to perform phase-sensitive determination of the symmetry of the pairing amplitude.
Understanding strongly correlated quantum systems is a central problem in many areas of physics. The collective behavior of interacting particles gives rise to diverse fundamental phenomena such as confinement in quantum chromodynamics, phase transit
ions, and electron fractionalization in the quantum Hall regime. While such systems typically involve massive particles, optical photons can also interact with each other in a nonlinear medium. In practice, however, such interactions are often very weak. Here we describe a novel technique that allows the creation of a strongly correlated quantum gas of photons using one-dimensional optical systems with tight field confinement and coherent photon trapping techniques. The confinement enables the generation of large, tunable optical nonlinearities via the interaction of photons with a nearby cold atomic gas. In its extreme, we show that a quantum light field can undergo fermionization in such one-dimensional media, which can be probed via standard photon correlation measurements.
