Decoherence in a Dynamical Quantum Phase Transition

Motivated by the similarity between adiabatic quantum algorithms and quantum phase transitions, we study the impact of decoherence on the sweep through a second-order quantum phase transition for the prototypical example of the Ising chain in a transverse field. For site-independent and site-dependent coupling strengths as well as different operator couplings, the results show that (in contrast to first-order transitions) the impact of decoherence caused by a weak coupling to a rather general environment increases with system size which might limit the scalability of the corresponding adiabatic quantum algorithm. We also propose a physical setup that can be used to simulate the quantum dynamics of the Ising model.