arXiv:1409.7361v3 [hep-th] 20 Jan 2015 UK/14-05 Kibble-Zurek Scaling in Holographic Quantum Quench : Backreaction Sumit R. Das(a,b)1and Takeshi Morita(a,c)2 (a)Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Kentucky, Lexington, KY 40506, USA (b)Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics, Kyoto University, Kyoto 606-8502, JAPAN (c)Department of Physics, Shizuoka University, 836 Ohya, Suruga-ku, Shizuoka 422-8529, JAPAN Abstract We study gauge and gravity backreaction in a holographic model of quan- tum quench across a superfluid critical transition.The model involves a com- plex scalar field coupled to a gauge and gravity field in the bulk.In earlier work (arXiv:1211.7076) the scalar field had a strong self-coupling, in which case the back- reaction on both the metric and the gauge field can be ignored.In this approxi- mation, it was shown that when a time dependent source for the order parameter drives the system across the critical point at a rate slow compared to the initial gap, the dynamics in the critical region is dominated by a zero mode of the bulk scalar, leading to a Kibble-Zurek type scaling function. We show that this mechanism for emergence of scaling behavior continues to hold without any self-coupling in the presence of backreaction of gauge field and gravity. Even though there are no zero modes for the metric and the gauge field, the scalar dynamics induces adiabaticity breakdown leading to scaling. This yields scaling behavior for the time dependence of the charge density and energy momentum tensor. 1e-mail:das@pa.uky.edu 2e-mail:morita.takeshi@shizuoka.ac.jp
1Introduction and summary Quantum (or thermal) quench across critical points is an interesting problem in many areas of physics. Consider starting in the gapped phase of a system and turning on a time dependent external parameter which drives it to a critical point at a rateslowcompared to the initial gap. While the initial time evolution will be adiabatic, adiabaticity will break down close to the critical point and the subsequent time evolution is expected to carry universal signatures of the critical point. Many years ago, Kibble [1], and subsequently Zurek [2], argued that observables like defect density indeed show scaling behavior. These arguments - which were first developed for thermal quench and recently generalized to quantum quench [3] [5] - imply that for a driving involving a single relevant operator, the time dependence of the one point function of an operatorOwith conformal dimensionx is of the form [6] O(t, v)∼vxν zν+1F(tvzν zν+1)(1.1) wherevis the rate of change of the coupling,νis the correlation length exponent and zis the dynamical critical exponent.The arguments which lead to (1.1) involve (i) an assumption that once adiabaticity breaks the system evolve in a diabatic fashion and (ii) in the critical region the instantaneous correlation length is the only length scale in the problem.The first assumption is rather drastic.The second assumption is reasonable, but unlike equilibrium critical behavior there is really no well understood conceptual framework like the renormalization group which explains why all other scales decouple from the problem.This is particularly so for strongly coupled systems.Nevertheless, Kibble-Zurek scaling has been verified by explicit calculations in many models and is now being seen experimentally as well [3, 4]. In [7] a study of this problem in strongly coupled field theories which have gravity duals via AdS/CFT was initiated and continued in [8] and [9]. The idea is to use holographic techniques to investigate scaling behavior for slow quenchwithout making any of the above assumptions. In the AdS/CFT correspondence a time dependent coupling of a strongly coupled boundary field theory corresponds to a time dependent boundary condition for the bulk dual field, so that the problem reduces to differential equations with time dependent boundary conditions.A mechanism for emergence of scaling emerges in these studies. These models involve bulk scalar fields which are dual to order parameters and the critical point is characterized by a zero mode of the scalar, i.e.a solution of the linearized equations of motion which satisfy zero source boundary conditions at the AdS boundary and regularity in the interior. It turns out that in the critical region where adiabaticity is broken (so that a Taylor expansion invbreaks down) , there is a new small-vexpansion 2
infractionalpowers ofv. To leading order in this expansion, the dynamics is dominated by the zero mode, and the resulting bulk equations of the zero mode lead to a scaling solution. The analysis can be also used to determine the corrections to scaling. These studies did not include the effect of fluctuations (i.e.1/N corrections in the boundary field theory). More recently [10] have studied the problem by modelling these fluctuations with a noise in the time evolution in a manner consistent with the fluctuation- dissipation theorem and found consistency with the Kibble Zurek mechanism.Other aspects of quantum quench which involve critical points have been investigated in [11], [12]. The models considered in [7] and [8] have scalar fields in the bulk with strong self- couplings, together with gravity and a Maxwell field.The strong self-coupling allows a probe approximation in which the backreaction of both the gravity and the bulk gauge field can be ignored, as in [13].It is important to examine the effects of backreaction. First, as we will see below, the zero mode is present only in the scalar sector - not for the gauge field or the metric perturbations.It is therefore of interest to know whether the critical dynamics of the gauge field and metric also simplifies and lead to scaling properties of the charge density and energy-momentum tensor in the boundary theory. Perhaps more importantly, it is interesting to know whether the system thermalizes in any sense at late times. This requires a complete treatment of the dynamics of the bulk metric. For a slow driving far away from any critical point, the evolution is essentially adiabatic. If we start from the ground state, as in the zero temperature cases of [8] and [9], this means that there is no collapse into a black hole. If the quench crosses a critical point, the system gets excited and it would be interesting to know what happens in the bulk. In this paper, we take the first step in incorporating backreaction by addressing the first question above. We will find that even though there is no zero mode in the gauge and gravity sectors, the scalar zero mode feeds in through nonlinearities and leads to a break- down of adiabatic evolution of the gauge and gravity fields. In the critical region there is again an expansion in fractional powers ofv. The scalar dynamics is dominated by the zero mode and the nonlinear coupling with the gauge field and the metric leads to scaling solutions for all the fields. The AdS/CFT dictionary then yields scaling functions for the expectation value of the order parameter, the charge density and the energy momentum tensor. We will not address the question of late time behavior and thermalization : this would require detailed numerical work which we postpone to a later investigation. For this purpose, we consider the holographic superfluid model of [14], subsequently studied by [15].The model considered in [8] is a variation of this model :the scalar has a self-coupling in addition to minimal coupling to the gauge field and the metric. One of the boundary space directions is compact with some radiusR. Quantum quench 3
is performed by introducing a time dependent boundary condition which corresponds to a time dependent source for the order parameter in the boundary field theory.In [8] non-linearity arose from self coupling of the scalar.In this paper, however, we set the self-coupling to zero - as in the work of [14]. Now the backreaction of the gauge field cannot be ignored. However, when the charge of the field is large, there is a probe approximation where the backreaction of gravity can be ignored (which was used in [14]).We first consider this probe approximation.We determine the equilibrium exponents, and then proceed to examine the breakdown of the adiabatic expansion. We show that the zero mode of the scalar field leads to a breakdown of adiabaticity inboththe scalar and the gauge sector.The time of breakdown is the same for both the fields - this serves as a consistency check on the calculation.We then examine the dynamics in the critical region closely following [7] - [9].In a way analogous to these works we find that there is a consistent small-vexpansion in fractional powers ofv. To leading order of this expansion, the zero mode of the scalar dominates the dynamics. While there is no zero mode for the gauge field, the equations of motion determine the dependence of the gauge field in the AdS radial direction in terms of the scalar zero mode, which leads again to decoupling of modes. The resulting leading order dynamics then exhibits scaling behavior like (1.1), and the expansion in fractional powers ofvprovides a way to calculate the corrections to scaling. We then proceed beyond the probe approximation and consider the backreaction of the metric and show the breakdown of adiabaticity, the existence of a small-vexpansion in fractional powers ofvand the emergence of scaling solutions are quite similar to the gauge field case. In Section (2) we describe the basic setup. Section (3) deals with the quench dynamics in the probe approximation.In section (4) we incorporate the backreaction of gravity. Section (5) contains conclusions and discussions. 2The Basic Setup The bulk action ind+ 2 dimensions is given by S= ∫ dd+2x√g [1 2κ2 ( R+d(d+ 1) L2 ) −1 4FµνFµν−(|∂µΦ−iqAµΦ|2−m2|Φ|2)] , (2.1) where Φ is a complex scalar field with chargeqandAµis an abelian gauge field, and the other notations are standard.Henceforth we will useL= 1 units.One of the spatial directions, which we will denote byθwill be considered to be compact. The radial 4
direction will be denoted byr. The mass of the scalar is chosen in the range m2 BF< m2< m2 BF+ 1,(2.2) wherem2 BF=−(d+ 1)2/2 is the Breitenholer-Freedman bound. The boundary theory has a finite chemical potentialµ, so that Limr→∞(At)→µ.(2.3) The temperature vanishes. Let us first set Φ = 0 (which is always a solution). As shown in [14], there is a value of the chemical potentialµ=µ0such that forµ < µ0the preferred solution to Einstein equation is an AdS soliton ds2=dr2 r2h(r) +r2 ( −dt2+ d−1∑ i=1 dx2 i ) +r2h(r)dθ2, (2.4) h(r)=1− (r0 r )d+1 , (2.5) At=µ ,(2.6) with constant parametersµandr0. The periodicity ofθin this solution is θ∼θ+4π (d+ 1)r0 ,(2.7) µ0is given by µ0=r0(d+ 1)(2d)d−1 2(d+1) (d−1)d d+1(d+ 1)1/2.(2.8) Forµ > µ0the preferred background is an extremal black brane.We will consider the soliton phase. In the remainder of the paper we will rescale all distances to setr0= 1. 3The Probe Approximation We now consider the effect of the scalar field. In this section we consider the regime q2≫κ2,(3.9) 5
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