Prescaling in a far-from-equilibrium Bose gas

TL;DR

This paper introduces the concept of prescaling in far-from-equilibrium Bose gases, showing that some properties scale early on during evolution, revealing universal behavior before reaching the true fixed point.

Contribution

It demonstrates that prescaling occurs in multi-species Bose gases, with certain correlations scaling early, and links this to symmetry breaking and conservation laws during non-equilibrium dynamics.

Findings

Prescaling occurs at experimentally accessible timescales.

Spatial correlations partially exhibit universal scaling during prescaling.

Symmetry breaking from U(N) to U(N-1) governs the prescaling behavior.

Abstract

Non-equilibrium conditions give rise to classes of universally evolving configurations of quantum-many body systems at non-thermal fixed points. While the fixed point and thus full scaling in space and time is generically reached at very long evolution times, we propose that systems can show prescaling much earlier in time, in particular, on experimentally accessible time scales. During the prescaling evolution, some well-measurable properties of spatial correlations already scale with the universal exponents of the fixed point while others still show scaling violations. Prescaling is characterized by the evolution obeying conservation laws associated with the remaining symmetry which also defines the universality class of the asymptotically reached non-thermal fixed point. Here we consider $N=3$ species of spatially uniform three-dimensional Bose gases, with identical inter- and intra-species interactions. During prescaling, the full $U(N)$ symmetry of the model is broken to $U(N-1)$ while the conserved transport, reflecting explicit and emerging symmetries, leads to the buildup of rescaling quasicondensate distributions.