Anti-Kibble-Zurek behavior of a noisy transverse-field XY chain and its quantum simulation with two-level systems

Abstract

We study the dynamics of a transverse-field XY chain driven across quantum critical points by noisy control fields. We characterize the defect density as a function of the quench time and the noise strength, and demonstrate that the defect productions for three quench protocols with different scaling exponents exhibit the anti-Kibble-Zurek behavior, whereby slower driving results in more defects. The protocols are quenching through the boundary line between paramagnetic and ferromagnetic phases, quenching across the isolated multicritical point and along the gapless line, respectively. We also show that the optimal quench time to minimize defects scales as a universal power law of the noise strength in all the three cases. Furthermore, by using quantum simulation of the quench dynamics in the spin system with well-designed Landau-Zener crossings in pseudo-momentum space, we propose an experimentally feasible scheme to test the predicted anti-Kibble-Zurek behavior of this noisy transverse-field XY chain with two-level systems under controllable fluctuations.