Observation of prethermal dynamical phase transitions and resonant melting.

In a programmable neutral-atom quantum simulator with spin models up to 180 qubits, prethermal dynamical regimes show sharp resonant melting and a prethermally driven first-order dynamical phase transition in two dimensions.

• Why it matters: Far-from-equilibrium quench dynamics in high-dimensional quantum systems are hard to simulate, and it is unclear how long-lived prethermal behavior breaks down or yields dynamical phase transitions beyond equilibrium boundaries.
• What they did: The team initialized product states and performed quenches across a broad parameter space, mapping stable dynamical regimes and their robustness to Floquet-like prethermal steady states over exponentially long emergent timescales.
• The result: They observed sharp peaks in dynamical response explained by structured melting via resonances, and in two dimensions used a generalized Clausius-Clapeyron test to quantify a first-order dynamical phase transition linked to Néel-order defect proliferation.

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