Maarten Van Damme

In recent years, dynamical phase transitions and out-of-equilibrium criticality have been at the forefront of ultracold gases and condensed matter research. Whereas universality and scaling are established topics in equilibrium quantum many-body physics, out-of-equilibrium extensions of such concepts still leave much to be desired. Using exact diagonalization and the time-dependent variational principle in uniform martrix product states, we calculate the time evolution of the local order parameter and Loschmidt return rate in transverse-field Ising chains with antiferromagnetic power law-decaying interactions, and map out the corresponding rich dynamical phase diagram. \textit{Anomalous} cusps in the return rate, which are ubiquitous at small quenches within the ordered phase in the case of ferromagnetic long-range interactions, are absent within the accessible timescales of our simulations in the antiferromagnetic case, showing that long-range interactions are not a sufficient condition for their appearance. We attribute this to much weaker domain-wall binding in the antiferromagnetic case. For quenches across the quantum critical point, \textit{regular} cusps appear in the return rate and connect to the local order parameter changing sign, indicating the concurrence of two major concepts of dynamical phase transitions. Our results consolidate conclusions of previous works that a necessary condition for the appearance of anomalous cusps in the return rate after quenches within the ordered phase is for topologically trivial local spin flips to be the energetically dominant excitations in the spectrum of the quench Hamiltonian. Our findings are readily accessible in modern trapped-ion setups, and we outline the associated experimental considerations.

In recent years, dynamical quantum phase transitions (DQPTs) have emerged as a useful theoretical concept to characterize nonequilibrium states of quantum matter. DQPTs are marked by singular behavior in an \textit{effective free energy} $λ(t)$, which, however, is a global measure, making its experimental or theoretical detection challenging in general. We introduce two local measures for the detection of DQPTs with the advantage of requiring fewer resources than the full effective free energy. The first, called the \textit{real-local} effective free energy $λ_M(t)$, is defined in real space and is therefore suitable for systems where locally resolved measurements are directly accessible such as in quantum-simulator experiments involving Rydberg atoms or trapped ions. We test $λ_M(t)$ in Ising chains with nearest-neighbor and power-law interactions, and find that this measure allows extraction of the universal critical behavior of DQPTs. The second measure we introduce is the \textit{momentum-local} effective free energy $λ_k(t)$, which is targeted at systems where momentum-resolved quantities are more naturally accessible, such as through time-of-flight measurements in ultracold atoms. We benchmark $λ_k(t)$ for the Kitaev chain, a paradigmatic system for topological quantum matter, in the presence of weak interactions. Our introduced local measures for effective free energies can further facilitate the detection of DQPTs in modern quantum-simulator experiments.

Considering nonintegrable quantum Ising chains with exponentially decaying interactions, we present matrix product state results that establish a connection between low-energy quasiparticle excitations and the kind of nonanalyticities in the Loschmidt return rate. When domain walls in the spectrum of the quench Hamiltonian are energetically favored to be bound rather than freely propagating, anomalous cusps appear in the return rate regardless of the initial state. In the nearest-neighbor limit, domain walls are always freely propagating, and anomalous cusps never appear. As a consequence, our work illustrates that models in the same equilibrium universality class can still exhibit fundamentally distinct out-of-equilibrium criticality. Our results are accessible to current ultracold-atom and ion-trap experiments.