Publications

Order by: publication date number of citations

• Extracting the symmetries of nonequilibrium quantum many-body systems

  Aleksandr N. Mikheev, Viktoria Noel, Ido Siovitz, Helmut Strobel, Markus K. Oberthaler, Jürgen Berges

  SciPost Phys. 18, 044 (2025) · published 4 February 2025 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  Symmetries play a pivotal role in our understanding of the properties of quantum many-body systems. While there are theorems and a well-established toolbox for systems in thermal equilibrium, much less is known about the role of symmetries and their connection to dynamics out of equilibrium. This arises due to the direct link between a system's thermal state and its Hamiltonian, which is generally not the case for nonequilibrium dynamics. Here we present a pathway to identify the effective symmetries and to extract them from data in nonequilibrium quantum many-body systems. Our approach is based on exact relations between correlation functions involving different numbers of spatial points, which can be viewed as nonequilibrium versions of (equal-time) Ward identities encoding the symmetries of the system. We derive symmetry witnesses, which are particularly suitable for the analysis of measured or simulated data at different snapshots in time. To demonstrate the potential of the approach, we apply our method to numerical and experimental data for a spinor Bose gas. We investigate the important question of a dynamical restoration of an explicitly broken symmetry of the Hamiltonian by the initial state. Remarkably, it is found that effective symmetry restoration can occur long before the system equilibrates. We also use the approach to define and identify spontaneous symmetry breaking far from equilibrium, which is of great relevance for applications to nonequilibrium phase transitions. Our work opens new avenues for the classification and analysis of quantum as well as classical many-body dynamics in a large variety of systems, ranging from ultracold quantum gases to cosmology.

  2 citations

• Population dynamics of Schrödinger cats

  Foster Thompson, Alex Kamenev

  SciPost Phys. 18, 046 (2025) · published 6 February 2025 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  We demonstrate an exact equivalence between classical population dynamics and Lindbladian evolution admitting a dark state and obeying a set of certain local symmetries. We then introduce quantum population dynamics as models in which this local symmetry condition is relaxed. This allows for non-classical processes in which animals behave like Schrödinger's cat and enter superpositions of live and dead states, thus resulting in coherent superpositions of different population numbers. We develop a field theory treatment of quantum population models as a synthesis of Keldysh and third quantization techniques and draw comparisons to the stochastic Doi-Peliti field theory description of classical population models. We apply this formalism to study a prototypical "Schrödinger cat" population model on a $d$-dimensional lattice, which exhibits a phase transition between a dark extinct phase and an active phase that supports a stable quantum population. Using a perturbative renormalization group approach, we find a critical scaling of the Schrödinger cat population distinct from that observed in both classical population dynamics and usual quantum phase transitions.

  2 citations

• Codebase release 2.1 for Pymablock

  Isidora Araya Day, Sebastian Miles, Hugo K. Kerstens, Daniel Varjas, Anton R. Akhmerov

  SciPost Phys. Codebases 50-r2.1 (2025) · published 12 February 2025 | Toggle abstract · src

  A common technique in the study of complex quantum-mechanical systems is to reduce the number of degrees of freedom in the Hamiltonian by using quasi-degenerate perturbation theory. While the Schrieffer-Wolff transformation achieves this and constructs an effective Hamiltonian, its scaling is suboptimal, it is limited to two subspaces, and implementing it efficiently is both challenging and error-prone. We introduce an algorithm for constructing an equivalent effective Hamiltonian as well as a Python package, Pymablock, that implements it. Our algorithm combines an optimal asymptotic scaling and the ability to handle any number of subspaces with a range of other improvements. The package supports numerical and analytical calculations of any order and it is designed to be interoperable with any other packages for specifying the Hamiltonian. We demonstrate how the package handles constructing a k.p model, analyses a superconducting qubit, and computes the low-energy spectrum of a large tight-binding model. We also compare its performance with reference calculations and demonstrate its efficiency.

  2 citations

• Bilateral photon emission from a vibrating mirror and multiphoton entanglement generation

  Alberto Mercurio, Enrico Russo, Fabio Mauceri, Salvatore Savasta, Franco Nori, Vincenzo Macrì, Rosario Lo Franco

  SciPost Phys. 18, 067 (2025) · published 24 February 2025 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  Entanglement plays a crucial role in the development of quantum-enabled devices. One significant objective is the deterministic creation and distribution of entangled states, achieved, for example, through a mechanical oscillator interacting with confined electromagnetic fields. In this study, we explore a cavity resonator containing a two-sided perfect mirror. Although the mirror separates the cavity modes into two independent confined electromagnetic fields, the radiation pressure interaction gives rise to high-order effective interactions across all subsystems. Depending on the chosen resonant conditions, which are also related to the position of the mirror, we study $2n$-photon entanglement generation and bilateral photon pair emission. Demonstrating the non-classical nature of the mechanical oscillator, we provide a pathway to control these phenomena, opening potential applications in quantum technologies. Looking ahead, similar integrated devices could be used to entangle subsystems across vastly different energy scales, such as microwave and optical photons.

  2 citations

• Generative learning of continuous data by tensor networks

  Alex Meiburg, Jing Chen, Jacob Miller, Raphaëlle Tihon, Guillaume Rabusseau, Alejandro Perdomo-Ortiz

  SciPost Phys. 18, 096 (2025) · published 17 March 2025 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  Beyond their origin in modeling many-body quantum systems, tensor networks have emerged as a promising class of models for solving machine learning problems, notably in unsupervised generative learning. While possessing many desirable features arising from their quantum-inspired nature, tensor network generative models have previously been largely restricted to binary or categorical data, limiting their utility in real-world modeling problems. We overcome this by introducing a new family of tensor network generative models for continuous data, which are capable of learning from distributions containing continuous random variables. We develop our method in the setting of matrix product states, first deriving a universal expressivity theorem proving the ability of this model family to approximate any reasonably smooth probability density function with arbitrary precision. We then benchmark the performance of this model on several synthetic and real-world datasets, finding that the model learns and generalizes well on distributions of continuous and discrete variables. We develop methods for modeling different data domains, and introduce a trainable compression layer which is found to increase model performance given limited memory or computational resources. Overall, our methods give important theoretical and empirical evidence of the efficacy of quantum-inspired methods for the rapidly growing field of generative learning.

  2 citations

• Nonlocality of deep thermalization

  Harshank Shrotriya, Wen Wei Ho

  SciPost Phys. 18, 107 (2025) · published 21 March 2025 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  We study the role of global system topology in governing deep thermalization, the relaxation of a local subsystem towards a maximally-entropic, uniform distribution of post-measurement states, upon observing the complementary subsystem in a local basis. Concretely, we focus on a class of (1+1)d systems exhibiting 'maximally-chaotic' dynamics, and consider how the rate of the formation of such a universal wavefunction distribution depends on boundary conditions of the system. We find that deep thermalization is achieved exponentially quickly in the presence of either periodic or open boundary conditions; however, the rate at which this occurs is twice as fast for the former than for the latter. These results are attained analytically using the calculus of integration over unitary groups, and supported by extensive numerical simulations. Our findings highlight the nonlocal nature of deep thermalization, and clearly illustrates that the physics underlying this phenomenon goes beyond that of standard quantum thermalization, which only depends on the net build-up of entanglement between a subsystem and its complement.

  2 citations

• Lyapunov exponents and entanglement entropy transition on the noncommutative hyperbolic plane

  Sriram Ganeshan, Alexios P. Polychronakos

  SciPost Phys. Core 3, 003 (2020) · published 20 August 2020 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  We study quantum dynamics on noncommutative spaces of negative curvature, focusing on the hyperbolic plane with spatial noncommutativity in the presence of a constant magnetic field. We show that the synergy of noncommutativity and the magnetic field tames the exponential divergence of operator growth caused by the negative curvature of the hyperbolic space. Their combined effect results in a first-order transition at a critical value of the magnetic field in which strong quantum effects subdue the exponential divergence for {\it all} energies, in stark contrast to the commutative case, where for high enough energies operator growth always diverge exponentially. This transition manifests in the entanglement entropy between the `left' and `right' Hilbert spaces of spatial degrees of freedom. In particular, the entanglement entropy in the lowest Landau level vanishes beyond the critical point. We further present a non-linear solvable bosonic model that realizes the underlying algebraic structure of the noncommutative hyperbolic plane with a magnetic field.

  2 citations

• Clock factorized quantum Monte Carlo method for long-range interacting systems

  Zhijie Fan, Chao Zhang, Youjin Deng

  SciPost Phys. Core 8, 036 (2025) · published 8 April 2025 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  Simulating long-range interacting systems is a challenging task due to its computational complexity that the computational effort for each local update is of order $\mathcal{O}(N)$, where $N$ is the size of the system. In this work, we introduce the clock factorized quantum Monte Carlo method, an efficient technique for simulating long-range interacting quantum systems. The method is developed by generalizing the clock Monte Carlo method for classical systems [Phys. Rev. E 99 010105 (2019)] to the path-integral representation of long-range interacting quantum systems, with some specific treatments for quantum cases and a few significant technical improvements in general. We first explain how the clock factorized quantum Monte Carlo method is implemented to reduce the computational overhead from $\mathcal{O}(N)$ to $\mathcal{O}(1)$. In particular, the core ingredients, including the concepts of bound probabilities and bound rejection events, the recursive sampling procedure, and the fast algorithms for sampling an extensive set of discrete and small probabilities, are elaborated. Next, we show how the clock factorized quantum Monte Carlo method can be flexibly implemented in various update strategies, like the Metropolis and worm-type algorithms. Finally, we demonstrate the high efficiency of the clock factorized quantum Monte Carlo algorithms using examples of three typical long-range interacting quantum systems, including the transverse field Ising model with long-range $z$-$z$ interaction, the extended Bose-Hubbard model with long-range density-density interactions, and the XXZ Heisenberg model with long-range spin interactions. We expect that the clock factorized quantum Monte Carlo method would find broad applications in statistical and condensed-matter physics.

  2 citations

• Out-of-equilibrium eigenstate thermalization hypothesis

  Laura Foini, Anatoly Dymarsky, Silvia Pappalardi

  SciPost Phys. 18, 136 (2025) · published 24 April 2025 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  Understanding how out-of-equilibrium states thermalize under quantum unitary dynamics is an important problem in many-body physics. In this work, we propose a statistical Ansatz for the matrix elements of non-equilibrium initial states in the energy eigenbasis, in order to describe such evolution. The approach is inspired by the Eigenstate Thermalisation Hypothesis (ETH) but the proposed Ansatz exhibits different scaling. Importantly, we point out the exponentially small cross-correlations between the observable and the initial state matrix elements that determine relaxation dynamics toward equilibrium. We numerically verify scaling and cross-correlation, point out the emergent universality of the high-frequency behavior, and outline possible generalizations.

  2 citations

• Spin-chain based quantum thermal machines

  Edoardo Maria Centamori, Michele Campisi, Vittorio Giovannetti

  SciPost Phys. 18, 160 (2025) · published 16 May 2025 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  We study the performance of quantum thermal machines in which the working fluid of the model is represented by a many-body quantum system that is periodically connected with external baths via local couplings. A formal characterization of the limit cycles of the set-up is presented in terms of the mixing properties of the quantum channel that describes the evolution of the fluid over a thermodynamic cycle. For the special case in which the system is a collection of spin $1/2$ particles coupled via magnetization preserving Hamiltonians, a full characterization of the possible operational regimes (i.e., thermal engine, refrigerator, heater and thermal accelerator) is provided: in this context we show in fact that the different regimes only depend upon a limited number of parameters (essentially the ratios of the energy gaps associated with the local Hamiltonians of the parts of the network which are in direct thermal contact with the baths).

  2 citations