Critical relaxation with overdamped quasiparticles in open quantum systems
- We study the late-time relaxation following a quench in an open quantum many-body system. We consider the open Dicke model, describing the infinite-range interactions between N atoms and a single, lossy electromagnetic mode. We show that the dynamical phase transition at a critical atom-light coupling is characterized by the interplay between reservoir-driven and intrinsic relaxation processes in the absence of number conservation. Above the critical coupling, small fluctuations in the occupation of the dominant quasiparticle mode start to grow in time, while the quasiparticle lifetime remains finite due to losses. Near the critical interaction strength, we observe a crossover between exponential and power-law 1/τ relaxation, the latter driven by collisions between quasiparticles. For a quench exactly to the critical coupling, the power-law relaxation extends to infinite times, but the finite lifetime of quasiparticles prevents aging from appearing in two-times response and correlationWe study the late-time relaxation following a quench in an open quantum many-body system. We consider the open Dicke model, describing the infinite-range interactions between N atoms and a single, lossy electromagnetic mode. We show that the dynamical phase transition at a critical atom-light coupling is characterized by the interplay between reservoir-driven and intrinsic relaxation processes in the absence of number conservation. Above the critical coupling, small fluctuations in the occupation of the dominant quasiparticle mode start to grow in time, while the quasiparticle lifetime remains finite due to losses. Near the critical interaction strength, we observe a crossover between exponential and power-law 1/τ relaxation, the latter driven by collisions between quasiparticles. For a quench exactly to the critical coupling, the power-law relaxation extends to infinite times, but the finite lifetime of quasiparticles prevents aging from appearing in two-times response and correlation functions. We predict our results to be accessible to quench experiments with ultracold bosons in optical resonators.…
