Interaction induced Landau-Zener transitions

TL;DR

This paper investigates a novel interaction-driven Landau-Zener transition in a quantum critical model, revealing significant differences between mean-field and quantum behaviors, especially regarding population transfer and interference effects.

Contribution

It introduces a new type of Landau-Zener transition mediated by interactions, highlighting the role of quantum fluctuations and interference in quantum critical systems.

Findings

Interaction-mediated transitions differ from traditional Landau-Zener models.

Quantum fluctuations suppress mean-field predicted population transfer.

Scaling of transfer probabilities with sweep velocity varies between models.

Abstract

By considering a quantum critical Lipkin-Meshkov-Glick model we analyze a new type of Landau-Zener transitions where the population transfer is mediated by interaction rather than from a direct diabatic coupling. For this scenario, at a mean-field level the dynamics is greatly influenced by quantum interferences. In particular, regardless of how slow the Landau-Zener sweep is, for certain parameters almost no population transfer occurs, which is in stark contrast to the regular Landau-Zener model. For moderate system sizes, this counterintuitive mean-field behaviour is not duplicated in the quantum case. This can be attributed quantum fluctuations and the fact that multi-level Landau-Zener-St\"uckelberg interferences have a `dephasing' effect on the above mentioned phenomenon. We also find a discrepancy between the quantum and mean-field models in terms of how the transfer probabilities scale with the sweep velocity.