Harnessing non-adiabatic excitations for quantum technological tasks

Non-adiabatic excitations are usually considered detrimental in many scenarios, and consequently several approaches have been developed to circumvent their formation. In contrast, here we show that non-adiabatic excitations formed because of the vanishing energy gap at a quantum critical point can be controlled and harnessed to perform certain tasks advantageously. Our results highlight the interplay between quantum thermodynamics and metrology with critical nonequilibrium dynamics.