Trajectory phase transitions and dynamical Lee-Yang zeros of the Glauber-Ising chain

Abstract: We examine the generating function of the time-integrated energy for the one-dimensional Glauber-Ising model. At long times, the generating function takes on a large-deviation form and the associated cumulant generating function has singularities corresponding to continuous trajec- tory (or "space-time") phase transitions between paramagnetic trajectories and ferromagnetically or anti-ferromagnetically ordered trajectories. In the thermodynamic limit, the singularities make up a whole curve of critical points in the complex plane of the counting field. We evaluate analyti- cally the generating function by mapping the generator of the biased dynamics to a non-Hermitian Hamiltonian of an associated quantum spin chain. We relate the trajectory phase transitions to the high-order cumulants of the time-integrated energy which we use to extract the dynamical Lee-Yang zeros of the generating function. This approach offers the possibility to detect continuous trajectory phase transitions from the finite-time behaviour of measurable quantities.