Quantum Quenches in Free Field Theory: Universal Scaling at Any Rate

Abstract

Quantum quenches display universal scaling in several regimes. For quenches which start from a gapped phase and cross a critical point, with a rate slow compared to the initial gap, many systems obey Kibble-Zurek scaling. More recently, a different scaling behaviour has been shown to occur when the quench rate is fast compared to all other physical scales, but still slow compared to the UV cutoff. We investigate the passage from fast to slow quenches in scalar and fermionic free field theories with time dependent masses for which the dynamics can be solved exactly for all quench rates. We find that renormalized one point functions smoothly cross over between the regimes.