Statistics of work distribution in periodically driven closed quantum systems

Statistical mechanics of Floquet quantum matter: exact and emergent conservation laws

Equilibrium statistical mechanics rests on the assumption of chaotic dynamics of a system modulo the conservation laws of local observables: extremization of entropy immediately gives Gibbs' ensemble (GE) for energy conserving systems and a generalized version of it (GGE) when the number of local conserved quantities is more than one. Through the last decade, statistical mechanics has been extended to describe the late-time behaviour of periodically driven (Floquet) quantum matter starting from a generic state. The structure built on the fundamental assumptions of ergodicity and identification of the relevant conservation laws in this inherently non-equilibrium setting. More recently, it has been shown that the statistical mechanics of Floquet systems has a much richer structure due to the existence ofemergentconservation laws: these are approximate but stable conservation laws arisingdue to the drive, and are not present in the undriven system. Extensive numerical and analytical results support perpetual stability of these emergent (though approximate) conservation laws, probably even in the thermodynamic limit. This banks on the recent finding of a sharp threshold for Floquet thermalization in clean, interacting non-integrable Floquet systems. This indicates to the possibility of stable Floquet phases of matter in disorder-free systems. This review intends to give a self-contained theoretical overview of these developments for a broad physics audience. We conclude by briefly surveying the current experimental scenario.

Work statistics across a quantum critical surface

We study the universality of work statistics of a system quenched through a quantum critical surface. By using the adiabatic perturbation theory, we obtain the general scaling behavior for all cumulants of work. These results extend the studies of Kibble-Zurek mechanism scaling of work statistics from an isolated quantum critical point to a critical surface. As an example, we study the scaling behavior of work statistics in the two-dimensional (2D) Kitaev honeycomb model featured with a critical line. By utilizing the trace formula for quadratic fermionic Hamiltonian, we obtain the exact characteristic function of work of the 2D Kitaev model at zero temperature. The results confirm our prediction.

Scaling Law for Irreversible Entropy Production in Critical Systems

We examine the Jarzynski equality for a quenching process across the critical point of second-order phase transitions, where absolute irreversibility and the effect of finite-sampling of the initial equilibrium distribution arise in a single setup with equal significance. We consider the Ising model as a prototypical example for spontaneous symmetry breaking and take into account the finite sampling issue by introducing a tolerance parameter. The initially ordered spins become disordered by quenching the ferromagnetic coupling constant. For a sudden quench, the deviation from the Jarzynski equality evaluated from the ideal ensemble average could, in principle, depend on the reduced coupling constant ε₀ of the initial state and the system size L. We find that, instead of depending on ε₀ and L separately, this deviation exhibits a scaling behavior through a universal combination of ε₀ and L for a given tolerance parameter, inherited from the critical scaling laws of second-order phase transitions. A similar scaling law can be obtained for the finite-speed quench as well within the Kibble-Zurek mechanism.

Dynamical Detection of Topological Phase Transitions in Short-Lived Atomic Systems

We demonstrate that dynamical probes provide direct means of detecting the topological phase transition (TPT) between conventional and topological phases, which would otherwise be difficult to access because of loss or heating processes. We propose to avoid such heating by rapidly quenching in and out of the short-lived topological phase across the transition that supports gapless excitations. Following the quench, the distribution of excitations in the final conventional phase carries signatures of the TPT. We apply this strategy to study the TPT into a Majorana-carrying topological phase predicted in one-dimensional spin-orbit-coupled Fermi gases with attractive interactions. The resulting spin-resolved momentum distribution, computed by self-consistently solving the time-dependent Bogoliubov-de Gennes equations, exhibits Kibble-Zurek scaling and Stückelberg oscillations characteristic of the TPT. We discuss parameter regimes where the TPT is experimentally accessible.