Nonequilibrium dynamics of bosonic Mott insulators in an electric field

We study the nonequilibrium dynamics of one-dimensional Mott-insulating bosons in the presence of a tunable effective electric field ε which takes the system across a quantum critical point separating a disordered and a translation symmetry broken ordered phase. We provide an exact numerical computation of the residual energy Q, the log fidelity F, the defect density D/L, and the order parameter correlation function for a linear-in-time variation of E with a rate v. We discuss the temporal and spatial variation of these quantities for a range of v and for finite system sizes as relevant to realistic experimental setups [ J. Simon et al. Nature (London) 472 307 (2011)]. We show that in finite-sized systems Q, F, and D obey Kibble-Zurek scaling, and suggest further experiments within this setup to test our theory.