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| Main Author: | |
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| Format: | Preprint |
| Published: |
2026
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.11420 |
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Table of Contents:
- It was recently conjectured and verified for the transverse-field Ising model [Phys. Rev. B 113, 165102 (2026)] that, after a sudden quench within the same equilibrium phase, the initial ground state has its largest overlap with the final ground state. We show that this phase-based criterion is generally false, even in translationally invariant free-fermion systems. For Hamiltonians that factorize into independent $2\times 2$ momentum sectors, we derive the exact necessary-and-sufficient condition for ground-state overlap dominance: the initial and final sector Bloch vectors must have positive dot product for every momentum. This result proves the conjecture in classes where same-phase quenches enforce this geometric condition, but gives explicit same-phase counterexamples in Kitaev chains, where excited final eigenstates can dominate the overlap distribution. We further show that the same obstruction controls real-time Fisher-zero crossings, allowing dynamical quantum phase transitions without crossing an equilibrium phase boundary.