Critical behavior can, however, as well occur in the transient dynamics after the system was pushed out of equilibrium. For so-called dynamical quantum phase transitions (DQPTs) time plays the role of the control parameter and the phenomenon bears surprising analogies to equilibrium phase transitions. In my Master’s project and continuing as a PhD student, I investigated DQPTs in the Kitaev model on the honeycomb lattice [3]. This work was one of the first studies of DQPTs in a two-dimensional system and it comprises a detailed analysis of the characteristics of the critical points based on the distribution of Fisher zeros in the complex time plane. In a subsequent work in collaboration with Markus Heyl we devised a Monte Carlo scheme to investigate DQPTs two- and three-dimensional quantum Ising models [4].
[1] P. Wang, M. Schmitt, and S. Kehrein, Universal nonanalytic behavior of the Hall con- ductance in a Chern insulator at the topologically driven nonequilibrium phase transition, Phys. Rev. B 93 085134 (2016)
[2] M. Schmitt and P. Wang, Universal non-analytic behavior of the non-equilibrium Hall con- ductance in Floquet topological insulators, Phys. Rev. B 96, 054306 (2017)
[3] M. Schmitt and S. Kehrein, Dynamical Quantum Phase Transitions in the Kitaev Honeycomb Model, Phys. Rev. B 92 075114 (2015)
[4] M. Schmitt and M. Heyl, Quantum dynamics in transverse-field Ising models from classical networks, SciPost Phys. 4, 013 (2018)