Understanding dynamical phase transitions in a spinor Bose–Einstein condensate via quantum and semiclassical analyses

Abstract

Abstract Phase transitions in nonequilibrium dynamics of quantum many-body system, known as dynamical phase transitions (DPTs), play an important role for understanding various dynamical phenomena observed in different branches of physics. In general, there are two types of DPTs, the first one is characterized by distinct evolutionary behaviors of a physical observable, while the second one is marked by the vanishing overlap between the time-evolved and initial states. Here, we focus on exploring such DPTs from both quantum and semiclassical perspectives in a spinor Bose–Einstein condensate (BEC), an ideal platform for investigating nonequilibrium dynamics. Utilizing the sudden quench process, we demonstrate that the system exhibits both types of DPTs as the control parameter is quenched through the critical value, referring to as the critical quenching. We show analytically how to determine the critical quenching via the semiclassical approach and carry out a detailed examination of both semiclassical and quantum signatures of DPTs. In particular, we reveal that the occurrence of DPTs is triggered by the separatrix in the underlying semiclassical system. Our findings offer deeper insights into the properties of DPTs and verify the usefulness of semiclassical analysis for studying DPTs in quantum systems with well-defined semiclassical limit.