Condensed Matter Seminar

January 31 2019

G126 noon

 

Victor Gurarie

University of Colorado

 

Dynamical singularities in many body localized systems

Abstract

Over the last few years it was pointed out that certain observables of time-evolving quantum systems may have singularities at certain moments in time, mimicking the singularities physical systems have when temperature approaches its phase transition value. These were given the name of dynamical phase transitions. They were shown to exist in certain integrable (exactly solvable) quantum systems, and were seen experimentally in some setups related (but not identical) to these solvable models. The "universality classes" of such singularities were not yet convincingly established, however. I will argue that random field Ising models feature singularities in time which may potentially be present in a wider variety of quantum systems, in particular in those which are many body localized, and describe these singularities in detail analytically.