Publications

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• Ground state analysis of the spin-1/2 XX chain model with anisotropic three-spin interaction

  Nima Mahboob, Saeed Mahdavifar, Fatemeh Khastehdel Fumani

  SciPost Phys. Core 8, 050 (2025) · published 11 August 2025 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  In this paper, we investigate the ground state properties of the spin-1/2 XX chain model with anisotropic three-spin interaction using the fermionization technique. By exactly diagonalizing the Hamiltonian, we analyze the dispersion relation, ground state energy, and order parameters. Our findings identify two gapless phases, distinguished by a Lifshitz transition line: one exhibiting long-range chiral correlations and the other characterized by chiral-nematic correlations. These correlations do not correspond to conventional symmetry-breaking local order parameters typically associated with gapped one-dimensional phases but instead signify emergent quantum coherence in the gapless regime. Further, we study the ground state phase diagram through the concurrence and quantum discord between nearest-neighbor spins, finding that these measures are maximized at the critical line, with an additional entangled region observed. Finally, we examine the spin squeezing parameter and entanglement entropy, demonstrating that the ground state is squeezed throughout and becomes extremely squeezed at the critical line. Notably, in the gapless chiral-nematic phase, the Heisenberg limit is achieved. By dividing the system into two equal parts, we observe significant entanglement in the gapless chiral phase. The central charge calculation confirms the critical nature of the gapless chiral-nematic phase, while the entanglement entropy follows volume-law scaling in the gapless chiral phase.

• Lectures in quantum gravity

  Ivano Basile, Luca Buoninfante, Francesco Di Filippo, Benjamin Knorr, Alessia Platania, Anna Tokareva

  SciPost Phys. Lect. Notes 98 (2025) · published 7 August 2025 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  Formulating a quantum theory of gravity lies at the heart of fundamental theoretical physics. This collection of lecture notes encompasses a selection of topics that were covered in six mini-courses at the Nordita PhD school "Towards Quantum Gravity". The scope was to provide a coherent picture, from its foundation to forefront research, emphasizing connections between different areas. The lectures begin with perturbative quantum gravity and effective field theory. Subsequently, two ultraviolet-complete approaches are presented: Asymptotically safe gravity and string theory. Finally, elements of quantum effects in black hole spacetimes are discussed.

  2 citations

• Hands-on introduction to randomized benchmarking

  Ana Silva, Eliska Greplova

  SciPost Phys. Lect. Notes 97 (2025) · published 21 July 2025 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  Randomized benchmarking techniques have been an essential tool for assessing the performance of contemporary quantum devices. The goal of this tutorial is to provide a pedagogical, self-contained, introduction to randomized benchmarking. With this intention, every chapter is also supplemented with an accompanying Python notebook, illustrating the essential steps of each protocol. In addition, we also introduce more recent trends in the field that bridge shadow tomography with randomized benchmarking, namely through the gate-set shadow protocol.

• Symmetry-enforced minimal entanglement and correlation in quantum spin chains

  Kangle Li, Liujun Zou

  SciPost Phys. 19, 020 (2025) · published 17 July 2025 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  The interplay between symmetry, entanglement and correlation is an interesting and important topic in quantum many-body physics. Within the framework of matrix product states, in this paper we study the minimal entanglement and correlation enforced by the $SO(3)$ spin rotation symmetry and lattice translation symmetry in a quantum spin-$J$ chain, with $J$ a positive integer. When neither symmetry is spontaneously broken, for a sufficiently long segment in a sufficiently large closed chain, we find that the minimal Rényi-$\alpha$ entropy compatible with these symmetries is $\min\{ -\frac{2}{\alpha-1}\ln(\frac{1}{2^\alpha}({1+\frac{1}{(2J+1)^{\alpha-1}}})), 2\ln(J+1) \}$, for any $\alpha∈\mathbb{R}^+$. In an infinitely long open chain with such symmetries, for any $\alpha∈\mathbb{R}^+$ the minimal Rényi-$\alpha$ entropy of half of the system is $\min\{ -\frac{1}{\alpha-1}\ln(\frac{1}{2^\alpha}({1+\frac{1}{(2J+1)^{\alpha-1}}})), \ln(J+1) \}$. When $\alpha→ 1$, these lower bounds give the symmetry-enforced minimal von Neumann entropies in these setups. Moreover, we show that no state in a quantum spin-$J$ chain with these symmetries can have a vanishing correlation length. Interestingly, the states with the minimal entanglement may not be a state with the minimal correlation length.

• Tunable anharmonicity in cavity optomechanics in the unresolved sideband regime

  Jonathan L. Wise, Clement Dutreix, Fabio Pistolesi

  SciPost Phys. 19, 016 (2025) · published 16 July 2025 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  Introducing a controlled and strong anharmonicity in mechanical systems is a present challenge of nanomechanics. In cavity optomechanics a mechanical oscillator may be made anharmonic by ponderomotively coupling its motion to the light field of a laser-driven cavity. In the regime where the mechanical resonating frequency and the single-photon coupling constant are small compared to the decay rate of the cavity field, it turns out that the quantum electromagnetic fluctuations of the laser field drive the oscillator into a high-temperature thermal state. The motional state may however be highly non-Gaussian; we show that a precise tuning of system parameters may even lead to a purely quartic effective potential for the mechanical oscillator. We present a theory that predicts the measurable signatures left by the mechanical anharmonicity. In particular, we obtain analytically and numerically the mechanical displacement spectrum, and explore the imprints of the mechanical anharmonicity on the cavity light field.

• Fidelity decay and error accumulation in random quantum circuits

  Nadir Samos Sáenz de Buruaga, Rafał Bistroń, Marcin Rudziński, Rodrigo M. C. Pereira, Karol Życzkowski, Pedro Ribeiro

  SciPost Phys. 19, 013 (2025) · published 8 July 2025 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  Fidelity decay captures the inevitable state degradation in any practical implementation of a quantum process. We devise bounds for the decay of fidelity for a generic evolution given by a random quantum circuit model that encompasses errors arising from the implementation of two-qubit gates and qubit permutations. We show that fidelity decays exponentially with both circuit depth and the number of qubits raised to an architecture-dependent power and we determine the decay rates as a function of the amplitude of the aforementioned errors. Furthermore, we demonstrate the utility of our results in benchmarking quantum processors using the quantum volume figure of merit and provide insights into strategies for improving processor performance. These findings pave the way for understanding how states evolving under generic quantum dynamics degrade due to the accumulation of different kinds of perturbations.

  2 citations

• Random circuits in the black hole interior

  Javier M. Magan, Martin Sasieta, Brian Swingle

  SciPost Phys. 19, 007 (2025) · published 3 July 2025 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  We present a quantitative holographic relation between a microscopic measure of randomness and the geometric length of the wormhole in the black hole interior. To this end, we perturb an AdS black hole with Brownian semiclassical sources, implementing the continuous version of a random quantum circuit for the black hole. We use the random circuit to prepare ensembles of states of the black hole whose semiclassical duals contain Einstein-Rosen (ER) caterpillars: Long cylindrical wormholes with large numbers of matter inhomogeneities, of linearly growing length with the circuit time. In this setup, we show semiclassically that the ensemble of ER caterpillars of average length $k\ell_{\Delta}$ and matter correlation scale $\ell_{\Delta}$ forms an approximate quantum state $k$-design of the black hole. At exponentially long circuit times, the ensemble of ER caterpillars becomes polynomial-copy indistinguishable from a collection of random states of the black hole. We comment on the implications of these results for holographic circuit complexity and for the holographic description of the black hole interior.

  1 citation

• Acceleration-induced transport of quantum vortices in joined atomtronic circuits

  Andrii Chaika, Artem O. Oliinyk, Ihor V. Yatsuta, Nick P. Proukakis, Mark Edwards, Alexander I. Yakimenko, Thomas Bland

  SciPost Phys. 19, 005 (2025) · published 2 July 2025 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  Persistent currents–inviscid quantized flow around an atomic circuit–are a crucial building block of atomtronic devices. We investigate how acceleration influences the transfer of persistent currents between two density-connected, ring-shaped atomic Bose-Einstein condensates, joined by a tunable weak link that controls system topology. We find that the acceleration of this system modifies both the density and phase dynamics between the rings, leading to a bias in the periodic vortex oscillations studied in T. Bland et al., Phys. Rev. Research 4, 043171 (2022). Accounting for dissipation suppressing such vortex oscillations, the acceleration facilitates a unilateral vortex transfer to the leading ring. We analyze how this transfer depends on the weak-link amplitude, the initial persistent current configuration, and the acceleration strength and direction. Characterization of the sensitivity to these parameters paves the way for a new platform for acceleration measurements, for which we outline a proof-of-concept ultracold double-ring accelerometer.

  1 citation

• Exact spin correlators of integrable quantum circuits from algebraic geometry

  Arthur Hutsalyuk, Yunfeng Jiang, Balazs Pozsgay, Hefeng Xu, Yang Zhang

  SciPost Phys. 19, 003 (2025) · published 1 July 2025 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  We calculate the correlation functions of strings of spin operators for integrable quantum circuits exactly. These observables can be used for the calibration of quantum simulation platforms. We use the algebraic Bethe Ansatz, in combination with computational algebraic geometry, to obtain analytic results for medium-size (around 10-20 qubits) quantum circuits. The results are rational functions of the quantum circuit parameters. We obtain analytic results for such correlation functions both in the real space and Fourier space. In the real space, we analyze the short time and long time limits of the correlation functions. In Fourier space, we obtain analytic results in different parameter regimes, which exhibit qualitatively different behaviors. Using these analytic results, one can easily generate numerical data to arbitrary precision.

  2 citations

• Lattice Bose polarons at strong coupling and quantum criticality

  Ragheed Alhyder, Victor E. Colussi, Matija Čufar, Joachim Brand, Alessio Recati, Georg M. Bruun

  SciPost Phys. 19, 002 (2025) · published 1 July 2025 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  The problem of mobile impurities in quantum baths is of fundamental importance in many-body physics. There has recently been significant progress regarding our understanding of this due to cold atom experiments, but so far it has mainly been concerned with cases where the bath has no or only weak interactions, or the impurity interacts weakly with the bath. Here, we address this gap by developing a new theoretical framework for exploring a mobile impurity interacting strongly with a highly correlated bath of bosons in the quantum critical regime of a Mott insulator (MI) to superfluid (SF) quantum phase transition. Our framework is based on a powerful quantum Gutzwiller (QGW) description of the bosonic bath combined with diagrammatic field theory for the impurity-bath interactions. By resumming a selected class of diagrams to infinite order, a rich picture emerges where the impurity is dressed by the fundamental modes of the bath, which change character from gapped particle-hole excitations in the MI to Higgs and gapless Goldstone modes in the SF. This gives rise to the existence of several quasiparticle (polaron) branches with properties reflecting the strongly correlated environment. In particular, one polaron branch exhibits a sharp cusp in its energy, while a new ground-state polaron emerges at the $O(2)$ quantum phase transition point for integer filling, which reflects the nonanalytic behavior at the transition and the appearance of the Goldstone mode in the SF phase. Smooth versions of these features are inherited in the polaron spectrum away from integer filling due to the influence of Mott physics on the bosonic bath. We furthermore compare our diagrammatic results with quantum Monte Carlo calculations, obtaining excellent agreement. This accuracy is quite remarkable for such a highly non-trivial case of strong interactions between the impurity and bosons in a maximally correlated quantum critical regime, and it establishes the utility of our framework. Finally, our results show how impurities can be used as quantum sensors and highlight fundamental differences between experiments performed at a fixed particle number or a fixed chemical potential.

  3 citations