Journal
NATURE COMMUNICATIONS
Volume 4, Issue -, Pages -Publisher
NATURE PUBLISHING GROUP
DOI: 10.1038/ncomms3291
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Funding
- NSF [PHY11-25915]
- United States Department of Energy through the LANL/LDRD Program
- LANL J. Robert Oppenheimer fellowship
- EU STREP PICC
- Alexander von Humboldt Foundation
- Career Integration Grant (CIG) [321798]
- EPSRC
- DFG through QUEST
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Symmetry breaking phase transitions play an important role in nature. When a system traverses such a transition at a finite rate, its causally disconnected regions choose the new broken symmetry state independently. Where such local choices are incompatible, topological defects can form. The Kibble-Zurek mechanism predicts the defect densities to follow a power law that scales with the rate of the transition. Owing to its ubiquitous nature, this theory finds application in a wide field of systems ranging from cosmology to condensed matter. Here we present the successful creation of defects in ion Coulomb crystals by a controlled quench of the confining potential, and observe an enhanced power law scaling in accordance with numerical simulations and recent predictions. This simple system with well-defined critical exponents opens up ways to investigate the physics of non-equilibrium dynamics from the classical to the quantum regime.
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