Zanardi Paolo, Paunković Nikola
Institute for Scientific Interchange (ISI), Villa Gualino, Viale Settimio Severo 65, I-10133 Torino, Italy.
Phys Rev E Stat Nonlin Soft Matter Phys. 2006 Sep;74(3 Pt 1):031123. doi: 10.1103/PhysRevE.74.031123. Epub 2006 Sep 26.
We present a characterization of quantum phase transitions in terms of the the overlap function between two ground states obtained for two different values of external parameters. On the examples of the Dicke and XY models, we show that the regions of criticality of a system are marked by the extremal points of the overlap and functions closely related to it. Further, we discuss the connections between this approach and the Anderson orthogonality catastrophe as well as with the dynamical study of the Loschmidt echo for critical systems.