Defect Production in Nonlinear Quench across a Quantum Critical Point

Abstract

We show that the defect density $n$, for a slow nonlinear power-law quench with a rate ${\ensuremath{\tau}}^{\ensuremath{-}1}$ and an exponent $\ensuremath{\alpha}>0$, which takes the system through a critical point characterized by correlation length and dynamical critical exponents $\ensuremath{\nu}$ and $z$, scales as $n\ensuremath{\sim}{\ensuremath{\tau}}^{\ensuremath{-}\ensuremath{\alpha}\ensuremath{\nu}d/(\ensuremath{\alpha}z\ensuremath{\nu}+1)}$ [$n\ensuremath{\sim}(\ensuremath{\alpha}{g}^{(\ensuremath{\alpha}\ensuremath{-}1)/\ensuremath{\alpha}}/\ensuremath{\tau}{)}^{\ensuremath{\nu}d/(z\ensuremath{\nu}+1)}$] if the quench takes the system across the critical point at time $t=0$ [$t={t}_{0}\ensuremath{\ne}0$], where $g$ is a nonuniversal constant and $d$ is the system dimension. These scaling laws constitute the first theoretical results for defect production in nonlinear quenches across quantum critical points and reproduce their well-known counterpart for a linear quench ($\ensuremath{\alpha}=1$) as a special case. We supplement our results with numerical studies of well-known models and suggest experiments to test our theory.