Hidden Quantum Criticality and Entanglement in Quench Dynamics (2202.04654v1)

Abstract: Entanglement exhibits universal behavior near the ground-state critical point where correlations are long-ranged and the thermodynamic entropy is vanishing. On the other hand, a quantum quench imparts extensive energy and results in a build-up of entropy, hence no critical behavior is expected at long times. In this work, we present a new paradigm in the quench dynamics of integrable spin chains which exhibit a ground-state order-disorder phase transition at a critical line. Specifically, we consider a quench along the critical line which displays a volume-law behavior of the entropy and exponentially decaying correlations; however, we show that quantum criticality is hidden in higher-order correlations and becomes manifest via measures such as the mutual information and logarithmic negativity. Furthermore, we showcase the scale-invariance of the R\'{e}nyi mutual information between disjoint regions as further evidence for genuine critical behavior. We attribute the emerging universality to the vanishing effective temperature of the soft mode in spite of the quench. Our results are amenable to an experimental realization on different quantum simulator platforms, particularly the Rydberg simulators.