Metastable criticality and the super Tonks-Girardeau gas

Abstract

We consider a 1D Bose gas with attractive interactions in an out-of-equilibrium highly excited state containing no bound states. We show that relaxation processes in the gas are suppressed, making the system metastable on long timescales. We compute dynamical correlation functions, revealing the structure of excitations, an enhancement of umklapp correlations and new branches due to intermediate bound states. These features give a clear indication of the attractive regime and can be probed experimentally. We observe that, despite its out-of-equilibrium nature, the system displays critical behaviour: correlation functions are characterised by asymptotic power-law decay described by the Luttinger liquid framework.