English

Quantum criticality in the nonunitary dynamics of $(2+1)$-dimensional free fermions

Statistical Mechanics 2021-05-13 v2 Disordered Systems and Neural Networks Quantum Physics

Abstract

We explore the nonunitary dynamics of (2+1)(2+1)-dimensional free fermions and show that the obtained steady state is critical regardless the strength of the nonunitary evolution. Numerical results indicate that the entanglement entropy has a logarithmic violation of the area-law and the mutual information between two distant regions decays as a power-law function. In particular, we provide an interpretation of these scaling behaviors in terms of a simple quasiparticle pair picture. In addition, we study the dynamics of the correlation function and demonstrate that this system has dynamical exponent z=1z=1. We further demonstrate the dynamics of the correlation function can be well captured by a classical nonlinear master equation. Our method opens a door to a vast number of nonunitary random dynamics in free fermions and can be generalized to any dimensions.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2101.04320,
  title  = {Quantum criticality in the nonunitary dynamics of $(2+1)$-dimensional free fermions},
  author = {Qicheng Tang and Xiao Chen and W. Zhu},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2101.04320},
  year   = {2021}
}

Comments

6 pages and 6 figures (main text) + 19 pages and 18 figures (appendices)