Observation of an anomaly in the statistics of Kibble-Zurek defects

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2512.02112v1
• Date: Mon, 01 Dec 2025 19:00:02 GMT
• Title: Observation of an anomaly in the statistics of Kibble-Zurek defects
• Authors: Jan Balewski, Alexey Khudorozhkov, Siva Darbha, Omar A. Ashour, Fangli Liu, Ermal Rrapaj, Sheng-Tao Wang, Pedro L. S. Lopes, Katherine Klymko, Milan Kornjača, Daan Camps,
• Abstract summary: The Kibble-Zurek mechanism quantifies defect formation during adiabatic passage across a continuous phase transition.<n>We explore counting statistics of defects in adiabatic passage experiments on long 1D Rydberg atom chains.
• Score: 0.18103209789390043
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Abstract: The Kibble-Zurek mechanism quantifies defect formation during adiabatic passage across a continuous phase transition, providing key insights into universality in quantum many-body systems. We explore counting statistics of defects in adiabatic passage experiments on long 1D Rydberg atom chains. The experiments reveal an anomaly in the defect number distribution at long ramp times, challenging the hypothesis of defect formation through independent domain mergers. Numerical simulations confirm the anomaly and suggest its link to non-critical coarsening dynamics, which we suppress in prepare-and-hold experiments. Our results highlight the ability of quantum simulators to uncover unexpected correlated quantum phenomena.

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