Experimental Observation of Dynamical Lee-Yang Zeros

Kay Brandner, Ville F. Maisi, Jukka P. Pekola, Juan P. Garrahan, Christian Flindt

Published 2016-10-27Version 1

Statistical physics provides the concepts and methods to explain the phase behavior of interacting many-body systems. Investigations of Lee-Yang zeros --- complex singularities of the free energy in systems of finite size --- have led to a unified understanding of equilibrium phase transitions. The ideas of Lee and Yang, however, are not restricted to equilibrium phenomena. Recently, Lee-Yang zeros have been used to characterize non-equilibrium processes such as dynamical phase transitions in quantum systems after a quench or dynamic order-disorder transitions in glasses. Here, we experimentally realize a scheme for observing Lee-Yang zeros in such non-equilibrium settings. We extract the dynamical Lee-Yang zeros of a stochastic process involving Andreev tunneling between a normal-state island and two superconducting leads from measurements of the dynamical activity along a trajectory. From short-time observations of the Lee-Yang zeros, we predict the large-deviation statistics of the dynamical activity which is otherwise difficult to measure. Our method paves the way for further experiments on the statistical mechanics of many-body systems out of equilibrium.