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ToolsWheeler, Matthew T., Salman, Hayder and Borgh, Magnus O. (2025) Dynamics of a nonequilibrium discontinuous quantum phase transition in a spinor Bose–Einstein condensate. Communications Physics, 8. ISSN 2399-3650
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Abstract
Symmetry-breaking quantum phase transitions lead to the production of topological defects or domain walls in a wide range of physical systems. In second-order transitions, these exhibit universal scaling laws described by the Kibble–Zurek mechanism, but for first-order transitions a similarly universal approach is still lacking. Here, we propose a spinor Bose–Einstein condensate as a testbed system where critical scaling behaviour in a first-order quantum phase transition can be understood from generic properties. We demonstrate the applicability of the Kibble–Zurek mechanism for this transition to determine the critical exponents for: (1) the onset of the decay of the metastable state on short times scales, and (2) the number of resulting phase-separated ferromagnetic domains at longer times, as a one-dimensional spin-1 condensate is ramped across a first-order quantum phase transition. The predictions are in excellent agreement with mean-field numerical simulations and provide a paradigm for studying the decay of metastable states in experimentally accessible systems.
| Item Type: | Article |
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| Additional Information: | The numerical simulations were carried out on the High Performance Computing Cluster supported by the Research and Specialist Computing Support service at the University of East Anglia. Data availability statement: The data for this study are available at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.14996614. Code availability statement: The code is available from the authors upon reasonable request. Funding information: MOB acknowledges support from Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council under Grant no. EP/V03832X/1. |
| Faculty \ School: | Faculty of Science > School of Engineering, Mathematics and Physics |
| UEA Research Groups: | Faculty of Science > Research Groups > Centre for Photonics and Quantum Science Faculty of Science > Research Groups > Fluids & Structures Faculty of Science > Research Groups > Quantum Matter Faculty of Science > Research Groups > Quantum Fluids (former - to 2024) |
| Related URLs: | |
| Depositing User: | LivePure Connector |
| Date Deposited: | 15 Apr 2025 09:30 |
| Last Modified: | 24 Apr 2025 08:32 |
| URI: | https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/99032 |
| DOI: | 10.1038/s42005-025-02048-7 |
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