Generalized dynamic scaling for quantum critical relaxation in imaginary time.

We study the imaginary-time relaxation critical dynamics of a quantum system with a vanishing initial correlation length and an arbitrary initial order parameter M0. We find that in quantum critical dynamics, the behavior of M0 under scale transformations deviates from a simple power law, which was proposed for very small M0 previously. A universal characteristic function is then suggested to describe the rescaled initial magnetization, similar to classical critical dynamics. This characteristic function is shown to be able to describe the quantum critical dynamics in both short- and long-time stages of the evolution. The one-dimensional transverse-field Ising model is employed to numerically determine the specific form of the characteristic function. We demonstrate that it is applicable as long as the system is in the vicinity of the quantum critical point. The universality of the characteristic function is confirmed by numerical simulations of models belonging to the same universality class.