Irreversible Work and Orthogonality Catastrophe in the Aubry-Andr\'e model

Abstract

We address the statistical orthogonality catastrophe induced by a local quench in the Aubry-Andr\'e model from the perspective of nonequilibrium thermodynamics. We study the average work and the irreversible work production when quenching the impurity potential in proximity of an orthogonality event. We show how this description is able to capture the level crossings generating the orthogonality and the avoided crossings which causes the plateau-like structures, signature of the Aubry-Andr\'e spectrum, when considering the full statistics of orthogonality events.