Non-equilibrium Quantum Phase Transition
What happens when a quantum critical point is affected by noise? An intuitive guess would be that the external noise defines an effective temperature. This effective temperature would introduce a well defined energy scale in the problem and break the scale invariance of the quantum critical point. On the contrary, it was recently found that certain types of noise can induce a non-equilibrium quantum critical state. This state is out-of-equilibrium because of the continuous energy flow introduced by the noise, but it still retains the scale invariant behavior typical of critical points.
Read more about this topic: Quantum Critical Point
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