Coarsening of Disordered Quantum Rotors under a Bias Voltage

TL;DR

This paper investigates the out-of-equilibrium dynamics of disordered quantum rotors under a bias voltage, revealing a quantum-classical crossover in coarsening behavior and deriving a universal scaling function for correlations.

Contribution

It provides a detailed analysis of the quantum rotor coarsening process under bias voltage, identifying the critical conditions and universal features of the dynamics.

Findings

Coarsening persists up to a critical voltage depending on reservoir properties.

The coherence length grows as t^{1/2}, similar to classical systems.

The late-time correlation function matches the classical form with a parameter-dependent prefactor.

Abstract

We solve the dynamics of an ensemble of interacting rotors coupled to two leads at different chemical potential letting a current flow through the system and driving it out of equilibrium. We show that at low temperature the coarsening phase persists under the voltage drop up to a critical value of the applied potential that depends on the characteristics of the electron reservoirs. We discuss the properties of the critical surface in the temperature, voltage, strength of quantum fluctuations and coupling to the bath phase diagram. We analyze the coarsening regime finding, in particular, which features are essentially quantum mechanical and which are basically classical in nature. We demonstrate that the system evolves via the growth of a coherence length with the same time-dependence as in the classical limit, $R(t) \simeq t^{1/2}$ -- the scalar curvature driven universality class. We obtain the scaling function of the correlation function at late epochs in the coarsening regime and we prove that it coincides with the classical one once a prefactor that encodes the dependence on all the parameters is factorized. We derive a generic formula for the current flowing through the system and we show that, for this model, it rapidly approaches a constant that we compute.