Dynamics of a Quantum Phase Transition and Relaxation to a Steady State

Understand

We review recent theoretical work on two closely related issues: excitation of an isolated quantum condensed matter system driven adiabatically across a continuous quantum phase transition or a gapless phase, and apparent relaxation of an excited system after a sudden quench of a parameter in its Hamiltonian.

• Accordingly the review is divided into two parts.
• The first part revolves around a quantum version of the Kibble-Zurek mechanism including also phenomena that go beyond this simple paradigm.
• What they have in common is that excitation of a gapless many-body system scales with a power of the driving rate.