Publications

Order by: publication date number of citations

• Magic phase transition and non-local complexity in generalized W State

  Alberto Giuseppe Catalano, Jovan Odavić, Gianpaolo Torre, Alioscia Hamma, Fabio Franchini, Salvatore Marco Giampaolo

  SciPost Phys. Core 8, 078 (2025) · published 6 November 2025 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  We employ the Stabilizer Rényi Entropy (SRE) to characterize a quantum phase transition that has so far eluded any standard description and can thus now be explained in terms of the interplay between its non-stabilizer properties and entanglement. The transition under consideration separates a region with a unique ground state from one with a degenerate ground state manifold spanned by states with finite and opposite (intensive) momenta. We show that SRE has a jump at the crossing points, while the entanglement entropy remains continuous. Moreover, by leveraging a Clifford circuit mapping, we connect the observed jump in SRE to that occurring between standard and generalized $W$-states with finite momenta. This mapping allows us to quantify the SRE discontinuity analytically.

• Calculation of asymptotic normalization coefficients in the complex-ranged Gaussian basis

  Dinmukhamed A. Sailaubek, Olga A. Rubtsova

  SciPost Phys. Proc. 3, 043 (2020) · published 27 February 2020 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  A new technique towards finding asymptotic normalization coefficients in the complex-ranged Gaussian basis is presented. It is shown that a diagonalisation procedure for the total Hamiltonian matrix in the given basis results in approximation for a radial part of the bound state wave function from the origin up to the far asymptotic distances, which allows to extract ANCs rather accurately. The method is illustrated by calculations of single-particle ANCs for nuclei bound states in cases of non-local nucleon-nucleus interactions, in particular, phenomenological global potentials with the Perey-Buck's non-locality.

• Fractal decompositions and tensor network representations of Bethe wavefunctions

  Subhayan Sahu, Guifre Vidal

  SciPost Phys. Core 8, 067 (2025) · published 10 October 2025 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  We investigate the entanglement structure of a generic $M$-particle Bethe wavefunction (not necessarily an eigenstate of an integrable model) on a 1d lattice by dividing the lattice into $L$ parts and decomposing the wavefunction into a sum of products of $L$ local wavefunctions. Using the fact that a Bethe wavefunction accepts a fractal multipartite decomposition – it can always be written as a linear combination of $L^M$ products of $L$ local wavefunctions, where each local wavefunction is in turn also a Bethe wavefunction – we then build exact, analytical tensor network representations with finite bond dimension $\chi=2^M$, for a generic planar tree tensor network (TTN), which includes a matrix product states (MPS) and a regular binary TTN as prominent particular cases. For a regular binary tree, the network has depth $\log_{2}(N/M)$ and can be transformed into an adaptive quantum circuit of the same depth, composed of unitary gates acting on $2^M$-dimensional qudits and mid-circuit measurements, that deterministically prepares the Bethe wavefunction. Finally, we put forward a much larger class of generalized Bethe wavefunctions, for which the above decompositions, tensor network and quantum circuit representations are also possible.

• Quantum adiabaticity in many-body systems and almost-orthogonality in complementary subspace

  Jyong-Hao Chen, Vadim Cheianov

  SciPost Phys. Core 8, 084 (2025) · published 12 November 2025 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  We investigate why, in quantum many-body systems, the adiabatic fidelity and the overlap between the initial state and instantaneous ground states often yield nearly identical values. Our analysis suggests that this phenomenon results from an interplay between two intrinsic limits of many-body systems: the limit of small evolution parameters and the limit of large system sizes. In the former case, conventional perturbation theory provides a straightforward explanation. In the latter case, a key insight is that pairs of vectors in the Hilbert space orthogonal to the initial state tend to become nearly orthogonal as the system size increases. We illustrate these general findings with two representative models of driven many-body systems: the driven Rice-Mele model and the driven interacting Kitaev chain model.

• Emergent Kitaev materials in synthetic Fermi-Hubbard bilayers

  Daniel González-Cuadra, Alejandro Bermudez

  SciPost Phys. 19, 130 (2025) · published 18 November 2025 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  We investigate the emergence of bond-directional spin-spin interactions in a synthetic Fermi-Hubbard bilayer that can be realized with ultracold fermions in Raman optical lattices. The model exploits synthetic dimensions to couple two honeycomb layers, each corresponding to a different hyperfine atomic state, via Raman-assisted tunneling and, moreover, via an inter-layer Hubbard repulsion due to the cold-atom scattering. In the strong-coupling regime at half filling, we derive effective spin Hamiltonians for the kinetic exchange featuring Kitaev, Heisenberg, off-diagonal exchange ($\Gamma$-couplings), as well as tunable Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interactions. We identify specific configurations that generate both ferromagnetic and antiferromagnetic Kitaev couplings with various perturbations of relevance to Kitaev materials, providing a tunable platform that can explore how quantum spin liquids emerge from itinerant fermion systems. We analyze the Fermi-liquid and Mott-insulating phases, highlighting a correspondence between Dirac and Majorana quasi-particles, with possible phase transitions thereof. In an extreme anisotropic limit, we show that the model reduces to an inter-layer ribbon in a quasi-1D ladder, allowing for a numerical study of the correlated ground state using matrix product states. We find a transition from a symmetry-protected topological insulator to a Kitaev-like regime characterized by nonlocal string order. Our results establish that cold-atom quantum simulators based on Raman optical lattices can be a playground for extended Kitaev models, bridging itinerant fermionic systems and spin-liquid physics.

• A graph-theoretic approach to chaos and complexity in quantum systems

  Maxwell West, Neil Dowling, Angus Southwell, Martin Sevior, Muhammad Usman, Kavan Modi, Thomas Quella

  SciPost Phys. Core 8, 081 (2025) · published 10 November 2025 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  There has recently been considerable interest in studying quantum systems via dynamical Lie algebras (DLAs) – Lie algebras generated by the terms which appear in the Hamiltonian of the system. However, there are some important properties that are revealed only at a finer level of granularity than the DLA. In this work we explore, via the commutator graph, average notions of scrambling, chaos and complexity over ensembles of systems with DLAs that possess a basis consisting of Pauli strings. Unlike DLAs, commutator graphs are sensitive to short-time dynamics, and therefore constitute a finer probe to various characteristics of the corresponding ensemble. We link graph-theoretic properties of the commutator graph to the out-of-time-order correlator (OTOC), the frame potential, the frustration graph of the Hamiltonian of the system, and the Krylov complexity of operators evolving under the dynamics. For example, we reduce the calculation of average OTOCs to a counting problem on the graph; separately, we connect the Krylov complexity of an operator to the module structure of the adjoint action of the DLA on the space of operators in which it resides, and prove that its average over the ensemble is lower bounded by the average shortest path length between the initial operator and the other operators in the commutator graph.

• Spectral anomalies and broken symmetries in maximally chaotic quantum maps

  Laura Shou, Amit Vikram, Victor Galitski

  SciPost Phys. 18, 151 (2025) · published 12 May 2025 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  Spectral statistics such as the level spacing statistics and spectral form factor (SFF) are widely expected to accurately identify "ergodicity," including the presence of underlying macroscopic symmetries, in generic quantum systems ranging from quantized chaotic maps to interacting many-body systems. By studying various quantizations of maximally chaotic maps that break a discrete classical symmetry upon quantization, we demonstrate that this approach can be misleading and fail to detect macroscopic symmetries. Notably, the same classical map can exhibit signatures of different random matrix symmetry classes in short-range spectral statistics depending on the quantization. While the long-range spectral statistics encoded in the early time ramp of the SFF are more robust and correctly identify macroscopic symmetries in several common quantizations, we also demonstrate analytically and numerically that the presence of Berry-like phases in the quantization leads to spectral anomalies, which break this correspondence. Finally, we provide numerical evidence that long-range spectral rigidity remains directly correlated with ergodicity in the quantum dynamical sense of visiting a complete orthonormal basis.

• The role of atomic interactions in cavity-induced continuous time crystals

  Christian Høj Johansen, Johannes Lang, Francesco Piazza

  SciPost Phys. 17, 089 (2024) · published 24 September 2024 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  We consider continuous time-crystalline phases in dissipative many-body systems of atoms in cavities, focusing on the role of short-range interatomic interactions. First, we show that the latter can alter the nature of the time crystal by changing the type of the underlying critical bifurcation. Second, we characterize the heating mechanism and dynamics resulting from the short-range interactions and demonstrate that they make the time crystal inherently metastable. We argue this is generic for the broader class of dissipative time crystals in atom-cavity systems whenever the cavity loss rate is comparable to the atomic recoil energy. We observe that such a scenario for heating has several similarities to the one proposed for preheating in the early universe, where the oscillating coherent inflation field decays into a cascade of exponentially growing fluctuations. By extending approaches for dissipative dynamical systems to our many-body problem, we obtain analytical predictions for the parameters describing the phase transition and the heating rate inside the time-crystalline phase. We underpin and extend the analytical predictions of the heating rates with numerical simulations, which also show that the metastable regime exists when the inherent stochastic nature is taken into account.

• Extracting quantum-critical properties from directly evaluated enhanced perturbative continuous unitary transformations

  L. Schamriß, M. R. Walther, K. P. Schmidt

  SciPost Phys. 17, 094 (2024) · published 26 September 2024 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  Directly evaluated enhanced perturbative continuous unitary transformations (deepCUTs) are used to calculate non-perturbatively extrapolated numerical data for the ground-state energy and the energy gap. The data coincide with numerical evaluations of the truncated perturbative series and provide robust extrapolations beyond the perturbative regime. We develop a general scheme to extract quantum-critical properties from the deepCUT data based on critical scaling and a strict correspondence between the truncation used for deepCUT and the length scale of correlations at the critical point. We apply our approach to transverse-field Ising models (TFIMs) as paradigmatic systems for quantum phase transitions of various universality classes depending on the lattice geometry and the choice of antiferromagnetic or ferromagnetic coupling. In particular, we focus on the quantum phase diagram of the bilayer antiferromagnetic TFIM on the triangular lattice with an Ising-type interlayer coupling. Without a field, the model is known to host a classically disordered ground state, and in the limit of decoupled layers it exhibits the 3d-XY 'order by disorder' transition of the corresponding single-layer model. Our starting point for the unknown parts of the phase diagram is a high-order perturbative calculation about the limit of isolated dimers where the model is in a gapped phase.

• Bogoliubov phonons in a Bose-Einstein condensate from the one-loop perturbative renormalization group

  Niklas Rasch, Aleksandr N. Mikheev, Thomas Gasenzer

  SciPost Phys. Core 7, 066 (2024) · published 27 September 2024 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  Wilson's renormalization-group approach to the weakly-interacting single-component Bose gas is discussed within the symmetry-broken, condensate phase. Extending upon the work by Bijlsma and Stoof, wave-function renormalization of the temporal derivative contributions to the effective action is included in order to capture sound-like quasiparticle excitations with wave lengths larger than the healing-length scale. By means of a suitable rescaling scheme we achieve convergence of the coupling flows, which serve as a means to determine the condensate depletion in accordance with Bogoliubov theory, as well as the interaction-induced shift of the critical temperature.