Abstract
Phase transitions in dissipative quantum systems are intriguing because they are induced by the interplay between coherent quantum and incoherent classical fluctuations. Here, we investigate the crossover from a quantum to a classical absorbing phase transition arising in the quantum contact process (QCP). The Lindblad equation contains two parameters, $\omega$ and $\kappa$, which adjust the contributions of the quantum and classical effects, respectively. We find that in one dimension when the QCP starts from a homogeneous state with all active sites, there exists a critical line in the region $0 \le \kappa < \kappa_*$ along which the exponent $\alpha$ (which is associated with the density of active sites) decreases continuously from a quantum to the classical directed percolation (DP) value. This behavior suggests that the quantum coherent effect remains to some extent near $\kappa=0$. However, when the QCP in one dimension starts from a heterogeneous state with all inactive sites except for one active site, all the critical exponents have the classical DP values for $\kappa \ge 0$. In two dimensions, anomalous crossover behavior does not occur, and classical DP behavior appears in the entire region of $\kappa \ge 0$ regardless of the initial configuration. Neural network machine learning is used to identify the critical line and determine the correlation length exponent. Numerical simulations using the quantum jump Monte Carlo technique and tensor network method are performed to determine all the other critical exponents of the QCP.
Highlights
We investigated the 1D-quantum contact process (QCP) and 2D-QCP as prototypical examples of nonequilibrium absorbing phase transitions in dissipative quantum systems
When the 1D-QCP starts from a homogeneous state, the transition curve between the absorbing and active phases has two parts: a quantum region [0, κ∗] and the classical directed percolation (DP) region [κ∗, κc]
For the 2D-QCP, we find a continuous transition at κ = 0 in the DP class, which is inconsistent with the prediction by the functional renormalization group approach [34]
Summary
Quantum critical phenomena in nonequilibrium systems have attracted considerable attention recently [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15,16,17,18,19] with the development of experimental techniques in cold atomic physics such as the use of trapped ions [4] and lattices of ultracold ions [5,6,7]; driven circuit quantum electrodynamics systems [8]; and semiconductor microcavities [9]. We are interested in dissipative phase transitions arising from competition between the coherent Hamiltonian dynamics and incoherent dissipation processes [20,21,22,23,24,25,26,27,28,29,30,31,32] For these systems, questions arise as to whether the competition between quantum coherent and classical incoherent fluctuations produces another type of universal behavior [22,32] and the conditions under which they exhibit classical critical behavior in terms of the loss rates to the environment [24,25,27].
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