Quantum Zeno effect as a topological phase transition in full counting statistics and spin noise spectroscopy

¹ Department of Physics, Texas A&M University - College Station, TX 77840, USA
² Theoretical Division, Los Alamos National Laboratory - Los Alamos, NM 87545, USA

^(a) lifuxiang225@gmail.com
^(b) renjie@lanl.gov
^(c) nsinitsyn@lanl.gov

Received: 13 October 2013
Accepted: 7 January 2014

Abstract

When the interaction of a quantum system with a detector changes from weak to strong-coupling limits, the system experiences a transition from the regime with quantum-mechanical coherent oscillations to the regime with a frozen dynamics. In addition to this quantum Zeno transition, we show that the full counting statistics of detector signal events experiences a topological phase transition at the boundary between two phases at intermediate coupling of a quantum system to the detector. We demonstrate that this transition belongs to the class of topological phase transitions that can be classified by elements of the braid group. We predict that this transition can be explored experimentally by means of the optical spin noise spectroscopy.