Nonadiabatic Phase Transition with Broken Chiral Symmetry

Abstract

We explore nonadiabatic quantum phase transitions in an Ising spin chain with a linearly time-dependent transverse field and two different spins per unit cell. Such a spin system passes through critical points with gapless excitations, which support nonadiabatic transitions. Nevertheless, we find that the excitations on one of the chain sub-lattices are suppressed in the nearly-adiabatic regime exponentially. Thus, we reveal a coherent mechanism to induce exponentially large density separation for different quasiparticles.