Description
Phase transitions play an important role in all branches of physics, from cosmology to the quark-gluon plasma, as they allow to study the structure of different systems. An important subclass are continuous phase transitions, which are usually related to symmetries and critical phenomena, and allow to classify different systems into universality classes. Each class is characterized by a set of critical exponents, which can be obtained for example by exploiting the Kibble-Zurek mechanism (KZM). However, the KZM relies on the ability to prepare the ground state of one phase and measure topological defects in a different phase. For complex and highly correlated magnetic systems, typically it is hard to experimentally prepare the ground state, and the form of the defects is not known. We present a novel technique that overcomes these limitations, possibly for arbitrary quantum spin systems, where the KZM critical exponent can be extracted by preparing a fully spin polarized state and the measurement of global magnetization. Analytically, we show that the method gives the correct KZM exponent for the 1D transverse field nearest-neighbour Ising model, and numerically for the disordered 1D transverse field nearest neighbour Ising model. We will also discuss a possible implementation using a Rydberg quantum simulator for disordered spin systems as realized in our lab.
