The notion of fidelity in quantum information science has been recently applied to analyze quantum phase transitions from the viewpoint of the ground-state (GS) overlap for various many-body systems. In this work, we unveil the intrinsic relation between the GS fidelity and the derivatives of GS energy and find that they play equivalent role in identifying the quantum phase transition. The general connection between the two approaches enables us to understand the different singularity and scaling behaviors of fidelity exhibited in various systems on general grounds. Our general conclusions are illustrated via several quantum spin models which exhibit different kinds of QPTs.

X-ray free-electron lasers enable the investigation of the structure and dynamics of diverse systems, including atoms, molecules, nanocrystals and single bioparticles, under extreme conditions. Many imaging applications that target biological systems and complex materials use hard X-ray pulses with extremely high peak intensities (exceeding 10 watts per square centimetre). However, fundamental investigations have focused mainly on the individual response of atoms and small molecules using soft X-rays with much lower intensities. Studies with intense X-ray pulses have shown that irradiated atoms reach a very high degree of ionization, owing to multiphoton absorption, which in a heteronuclear molecular system occurs predominantly locally on a heavy atom (provided that the absorption cross-section of the heavy atom is considerably larger than those of its neighbours) and is followed by efficient redistribution of the induced charge. In serial femtosecond crystallography of biological objects-an application of X-ray free-electron lasers that greatly enhances our ability to determine protein structure-the ionization of heavy atoms increases the local radiation damage that is seen in the diffraction patterns of these objects and has been suggested as a way of phasing the diffraction data. On the basis of experiments using either soft or less-intense hard X-rays, it is thought that the induced charge and associated radiation damage of atoms in polyatomic molecules can be inferred from the charge that is induced in an isolated atom under otherwise comparable irradiation conditions. Here we show that the femtosecond response of small polyatomic molecules that contain one heavy atom to ultra-intense (with intensities approaching 10 watts per square centimetre), hard (with photon energies of 8.3 kiloelectronvolts) X-ray pulses is qualitatively different: our experimental and modelling results establish that, under these conditions, the ionization of a molecule is considerably enhanced compared to that of an individual heavy atom with the same absorption cross-section. This enhancement is driven by ultrafast charge transfer within the molecule, which refills the core holes that are created in the heavy atom, providing further targets for inner-shell ionization and resulting in the emission of more than 50 electrons during the X-ray pulse. Our results demonstrate that efficient modelling of X-ray-driven processes in complex systems at ultrahigh intensities is feasible.

We investigate transition of a one-dimensional interacting Bose gas from a strongly repulsive regime to a strongly attractive regime, where a stable highly excited state known as the super Tonks-Girardeau gas was experimentally realized very recently. By solving exact dynamics of the integrable Lieb-Liniger Bose gas, we demonstrate that such an excited gas state can be a very stable dynamic state. Furthermore we calculate the breathing mode of the super Tonks-Girardeau gas which is found to be in good agreement with experimental observation. Our results show that the highly excited super Tonks-Girardeau gas phase can be well understood from the fundamental theory of the solvable Bose gas.

We investigate the ground state of the one-dimensional interacting anyonic system based on the exact Bethe ansatz solution for arbitrary coupling constant ($0\leq c\leq \infty$) and statistics parameter ($0\leq \kappa \leq \pi$). It is shown that the density of state in quasi-momentum $k$ space and the ground state energy are determined by the renormalized coupling constant $c'$. The effect induced by the statistics parameter $\kappa$ exhibits in the momentum distribution in two aspects: Besides the effect of renormalized coupling, the anyonic statistics results in the nonsymmetric momentum distribution when the statistics parameter $\kappa$ deviates from 0 (Bose statistics) and $\pi$ (Fermi statistics) for any coupling constant $c$. The momentum distribution evolves from a Bose distribution to a Fermi one as $\kappa$ varies from 0 to $\pi$. The asymmetric momentum distribution comes from the contribution of the imaginary part of the non-diagonal element of reduced density matrix, which is an odd function of $\kappa$. The peak at positive momentum will shift to negative momentum if $\kappa$ is negative.Comment: 6 pages, 5 figures, published version in Phys. Rev.