Impact of nonequilibrium fluctuations on prethermal dynamical phase transitions in long-range interacting spin chains

Abstract

We study the nonequilibrium phase diagram and the dynamical phase transitions occurring during the prethermalization of nonintegrable quantum spin chains, subject to either quantum quenches or linear ramps of a relevant control parameter. We consider spin systems in which long-range ferromagnetic interactions compete with short-range, integrability-breaking terms. We capture the prethermal stages of the nonequilibrium evolution via a time-dependent spin-wave expansion at leading order in the spin-wave density. In order to access regimes with strong integrability breaking, instead, we perform numerical simulations based on the time-dependent variational principle with matrix product states. By investigating a large class of quantum spin models, we demonstrate that nonequilibrium fluctuations can significantly affect the dynamics near critical points of the phase diagram, resulting in a chaotic evolution of the collective order parameter, akin to the dynamics of a classical particle in a multiple-well potential subject to quantum friction. We also elucidate the signature of this novel dynamical phase on the time-dependent correlation functions of the local order parameter. We finally establish a connection with the notion of dynamical quantum phase transition associated with a possible nonanalytic behavior of the return probability amplitude, or Loschmidt echo, showing that the latter displays cusps whenever the order parameter vanishes during its real-time evolution.