Contributor info: Prof. Alessandro Silva

Daniele Nello, Alessandro Silva

SciPost Phys. Core 7, 067 (2024) · published 4 October 2024 | Toggle abstract · pdf

We consider adiabatic quantum pumping through a resonant level model, a single-level quantum dot connected to two fermionic leads. Using the tools of adiabatic expansion, we develop a self-contained thermodynamic description of this model accounting for the variation of the energy level of the dot and the tunnelling rates with the thermal baths. This enables us to study various examples of pumping cycles computing the relevant thermodynamic quantities, such as the entropy produced and the dissipated power. These quantities are compared with the transport properties of the system, i.e. the pumped charge and the charge noise. Among other results, we find that the entropy production rate vanishes in the charge quantization limit while the dissipated power is quantized in the same limit.

Lorenzo Correale, Anatoli Polkovnikov, Marco Schirò, Alessandro Silva

SciPost Phys. 15, 190 (2023) · published 13 November 2023 | Toggle abstract · pdf

We study the dynamics of a quantum $p$-spin glass model starting from initial states defined in microcanonical shells, in a classical regime. We compute different chaos estimators, such as the Lyapunov exponent and the Kolmogorov-Sinai entropy, and find a marked maximum as a function of the energy of the initial state. By studying the relaxation dynamics and the properties of the energy landscape we show that the maximal chaos emerges in correspondence with the fastest spin relaxation and the maximum complexity, thus suggesting a qualitative picture where chaos emerges as the trajectories are scattered over the exponentially many saddles of the underlying landscape. We also observe hints of ergodicity breaking at low energies, indicated by the correlation function and a maximum of the fidelity susceptibility.

Caterina Zerba, Alessandro Silva

SciPost Phys. Core 6, 051 (2023) · published 18 July 2023 | Toggle abstract · pdf

We study dynamical phase transitions occurring in the stationary state of the dynamics of integrable many-body non-hermitian Hamiltonians, which can be either realized as a no-click limit of a stochastic Schrödinger equation or using spacetime duality of quantum circuits. In two specific models, the Transverse Field Ising Chain and the Long Range Kitaev Chain, we observe that the entanglement phase transitions occurring in the stationary state have the same nature as that occurring in the vacuum of the non-hermitian Hamiltonian: bounded entanglement entropy when the imaginary part of the quasi-particle spectrum is gapped and a logarithmic growth for gapless imaginary spectrum. This observation suggests the possibility to generalize the area-law theorem to non-Hermitian Hamiltonians.

Federica Maria Surace, Marcello Dalmonte, Alessandro Silva

SciPost Phys. 14, 174 (2023) · published 29 June 2023 | Toggle abstract · pdf

We investigate the emergence of quantum scars in a general ensemble of random Hamiltonians (of which the PXP is a particular realization), that we refer to as quantum local random networks. We find a class of scars, that we call "statistical", and we identify specific signatures of the localized nature of these eigenstates by analyzing a combination of indicators of quantum ergodicity and properties related to the network structure of the model. Within this parallelism, we associate the emergence of statistical scars to the presence of "motifs" in the network, that reflects how these are associated to links with anomalously small connectivity. Most remarkably, statistical scars appear at well-defined values of energy, predicted solely on the base of network theory. We study the scaling of the number of statistical scars with system size: by continuously changing the connectivity of the system we find that there is a transition from a regime where the constraints are too weak for scars to exist for large systems to a regime where constraints are stronger and the number of statistical scars increases with system size. This allows to define the concept of "statistical robustness" of quantum scars.

Silvia Pappalardi, Anatoli Polkovnikov, Alessandro Silva

SciPost Phys. 9, 021 (2020) · published 19 August 2020 | Toggle abstract · pdf

Understanding the footprints of chaos in quantum-many-body systems has been under debate for a long time. In this work, we study the echo dynamics of the Sherrington-Kirkpatrick (SK) model with transverse field under effective time reversal. We investigate numerically its quantum and semiclassical dynamics. We explore how chaotic many-body quantum physics can lead to exponential divergence of the echo of observables and we show that it is a result of three requirements: i) the collective nature of the observable, ii) a properly chosen initial state and iii) the existence of a well-defined chaotic semi-classical (large-$N$) limit. Under these conditions, the echo grows exponentially up to the Ehrenfest time, which scales logarithmically with the number of spins $N$. In this regime, the echo is well described by the semiclassical (truncated Wigner) approximation. We also discuss a short-range version of the SK model, where the Ehrenfest time does not depend on $N$ and the quantum echo shows only polynomial growth. Our findings provide new insights on scrambling and echo dynamics and how to observe it experimentally.