Metastable Criticality and the Super Tonks-Girardeau Gas

We consider a 1D Bose gas with attractive interactions in a highly excited state containing no bound states. We show that in this so-called super Tonks-Girardeau gas, relaxation processes are suppressed, making the system metastable over long time scales. We compute dynamical correlation functions, revealing the structure of excitations, an enhancement of umklapp correlations and new branches due to intermediate bound states. These features give a clear signature of the super Tonks-Girardeau regime and can be used to experimentally identify it. We demonstrate that, despite its off-equilibrium nature, the system displays critical behavior: correlation functions are characterized by asymptotic power-law decay described by the Luttinger liquid framework. DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.110.125302