Research Projects

The Kibble-Zurek mechanism (KZM) describes the non-equilibrium dynamics across a continuous phase transition in finite time and predicts the topological defect density emerging from the spontaneous symmetry breaking. The post-KZM process is the relaxation of the system to equilibrium through the defect interactions. During this process, higher dimensional systems with spatial dimension greater than one exhibit rich phenomena like quantum turbulence, defect coarsening and development of quantum correlations, where the quantum turbulence and defect coarsening heavily depends on the type of defects formed in the system and their interactions. This proposal aim to study these phenomena resulting from the post-KZM dynamics by cooling a Bose gas below to the temperature required for Bose-Einstein condensation. We model this system with the stochastic field equations and explore the universal scaling rules that dictate the post-KZM dynamics and link the non-equilibrium quantum dynamics with the defect dynamics. Moreover, we develop a theoretical frame work that relate the KZM equilibrium scaling laws with the post-KZM dynamics.