Publications

Quasicondensation in one dimension is known to occur for equilibrium systems of hard-core bosons (HCBs) at zero temperature. This phenomenon arises due to the off-diagonal long-range order in the ground state, characterized by a power-law decay of the one-particle density matrix g 1 ( x , y ) ∼ | x − y | − 1 / 2 —a well-known outcome of Luttinger liquid theory. Remarkably, HCBs, when allowed to freely expand from an initial product state (i.e. characterized by initial zero correlation), exhibit quasicondensation and demonstrate the emergence of off-diagonal long-range order during nonequilibrium dynamics. This phenomenon has been substantiated by numerical and experimental investigations in the early 2000s. In this work, we revisit the dynamical quasicondensation of HCBs, providing a fully analytical treatment of the issue. In particular, we derive an exact asymptotic formula for the equal-time one-particle density matrix by borrowing ideas from the framework of quantum Generalized Hydrodynamics. Our findings elucidate the phenomenology of quasicondensation and of dynamical fermionization occurring at different stages of the time evolution, as well as the crossover between the two.

Avalanche resistive switching is the fundamental process that triggers the sudden change of the electrical properties in solid-state devices under the action of intense electric fields. Despite its relevance for information processing, ultrafast electronics, neuromorphic devices, resistive memories and brain-inspired computation, the nature of the local stochastic fluctuations that drive the formation of metallic regions within the insulating state has remained hidden. Here, using operando X-ray nano-imaging, we have captured the origin of resistive switching in a V2O3-based device under working conditions. V2O3 is a paradigmatic Mott material, which undergoes a first-order metal-to-insulator phase transition together with a lattice transformation that breaks the threefold rotational symmetry of the rhombohedral metallic phase. We reveal a new class of volatile electronic switching triggered by nanoscale topological defects appearing in the shear-strain based order parameter that describes the insulating phase. Our results pave the way to the use of strain engineering approaches to manipulate such topological defects and achieve the full dynamical control of the electronic Mott switching. Topology-driven, reversible electronic transitions are relevant across a broad range of quantum materials, comprising transition metal oxides, chalcogenides and kagome metals.

In this paper we show how to measure in the setting of digital quantum simulations the reflection and transmission amplitudes of the one-dimensional scattering of a particle with a short-ranged potential. The main feature of the protocol is the coupling between the particle and an ancillary spin-1/2 degree of freedom. This allows us to reconstruct tomographically the scattering amplitudes, which are in general complex numbers, from the readout of one qubit. Applications of our results are discussed.

At T N ≃ 300K the layered insulator BaCoS2 transitions to a columnar antiferromagnet that signals non-negligible magnetic frustration despite the relatively high T N, all the more surprising given its quasi two-dimensional structure. Here, we show, by combining ab initio and model calculations, that the magnetic transition is an order-from-disorder phenomenon, which not only drives the columnar magnetic order, but also the inter-layer coherence responsible for the finite Néel transition temperature. This uncommon ordering mechanism, actively contributed by orbital degrees of freedom, hints at an abundance of low energy excitations above and across the Néel transition, in agreement with experimental evidence.

P-divisibility is a central concept in both classical and quantum non-Markovian processes; in particular, it is strictly related to the notion of information backflow. When restricted to a fixed commutative algebra generated by a complete set of orthogonal projections, any quantum dynamics naturally provides a classical stochastic process. It is indeed well known that a quantum generator gives rise to a P-divisible quantum dynamics if and only if all its possible classical reductions give rise to divisible classical stochastic processes. However, this property does not hold if one operates a classical reduction of the quantum dynamical maps instead of their generators: As an example, for a unitary dynamics, P-divisibility of its classical reduction is inevitably lost and the latter thus exhibits information backflow. Instead, for some important classes of purely dissipative qubit evolutions, quantum P-divisibility always implies classical P-divisibility and therefore excludes information backflow in both the quantum and classical scenarios. On the contrary, for a wide class of orthogonally covariant qubit dynamics, we show that loss of classical P-divisibility originates from the classical reduction of a purely dissipative P-divisible quantum dynamics as in the unitary case. Moreover, such an effect can be interpreted in terms of information backflow due to the coherences developed by the quantumly evolving classical state.

The possibility that gravity plays a role in the collapse of the quantum wave function has been considered in the literature, and it is of relevance not only because it would provide a solution to the measurement problem in quantum theory, but also because it would give a new and unexpected twist to the search for a unified theory of quantum and gravitational phenomena, possibly overcoming the current impasse. The Diósi-Penrose model is the most popular incarnation of this idea. It predicts a progressive breakdown of quantum superpositions when the mass of the system increases; as such, it is susceptible to experimental verification. Current experiments set a lower bound R 0 ≳ 4 Å for the free parameter of the model, excluding some versions of it. In this work we search for an upper bound, coming from the request that the collapse is effective enough to guarantee classicality at the macroscopic scale: we find out that not all macroscopic systems collapse effectively. If one relaxes this request, a reasonable (although to some degree arbitrary) bound is found to be: R 0 ≲ 10 6 Å. This will serve to better direct future experiments to further test the model.

Time-evolution of the Universe as described by the Friedmann equation can be coupled to equations of motion of matter fields. Quantum effects may be incorporated to improve these classical equations of motion by the renormalization group (RG) running of their couplings. Since temporal and thermal evolutions are linked to each other, astrophysical and cosmological treatments based on zero-temperature RG methods require the extension to finite-temperatures. We propose and explore a modification of the usual finite-temperature RG approach by relating the temperature parameter to the running RG scale as T≡kT=τk (in natural units), where kT is acting as a running cutoff for thermal fluctuations and the momentum k can be used for the quantum fluctuations. In this approach, the temperature of the expanding universe is related to the dimensionless quantity τ (and not to kT). We show that by this choice dimensionless RG flow equations have no explicit k-dependence, as it is convenient. We also discuss how this modified thermal RG is used to handle high-energy divergences of the RG running of the cosmological constant and to “solve the triviality” of the ϕ4 model by a thermal phase transition in terms of τ in d=4 Euclidean dimensions.

Local relaxation after a quench in 1D quantum many-body systems is a well-known and very active problem with rich phenomenology. Except in pathological cases, the local relaxation is accompanied by the local restoration of the symmetries broken by the initial state that are preserved by unitary evolution. Recently, the entanglement asymmetry has been introduced as a probe to study the interplay between symmetry breaking and relaxation in an extended quantum system. In particular, using the entanglement asymmetry, it has been shown that the more a symmetry is initially broken, the faster it may be restored. This surprising effect, which has also been observed in trapped-ion experiments, can be seen as a quantum version of the Mpemba effect, and is manifested by the crossing at a finite time of the entanglement asymmetry curves of two different initial symmetry-breaking configurations. In this paper we show that, by tuning the initial state, the symmetry dynamics in free fermionic systems can display much richer behavior than seen previously. In particular, for certain classes of initial states, including the ground states of free fermionic models with long-range couplings, the entanglement asymmetry can exhibit multiple crossings. This illustrates that the existence of the quantum Mpemba effect can only be inferred by examining the late-time behavior of the entanglement asymmetry.

The continued development of computational approaches to many-body ground-state problems in physics and chemistry calls for a consistent way to assess its overall progress. In this work, we introduce a metric of variational accuracy, the V-score, obtained from the variational energy and its variance. We provide an extensive curated dataset of variational calculations of many-body quantum systems, identifying cases where state-of-the-art numerical approaches show limited accuracy and future algorithms or computational platforms, such as quantum computing, could provide improved accuracy. The V-score can be used as a metric to assess the progress of quantum variational methods toward a quantum advantage for ground-state problems, especially in regimes where classical verifiability is impossible.

We introduce a novel hybrid approach combining tensor network methods with the stabilizer formalism to address the challenges of simulating many-body quantum systems. By integrating these techniques, we enhance our ability to accurately model unitary dynamics while mitigating the exponential growth of entanglement encountered in classical simulations. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method through applications to random Clifford T-doped circuits and random Clifford Floquet dynamics. This approach offers promising prospects for advancing our understanding of complex quantum phenomena and accelerating progress in quantum simulation.

Confining in space the equilibrium fluctuations of statistical systems with long-range correlations is known to result into effective forces on the boundaries. Here we demonstrate the occurrence of Casimir-like forces in the nonequilibrium context provided by flocking active matter. In particular, we consider a system of aligning self-propelled particles in two spatial dimensions that are transversally confined by reflecting or partially reflecting walls. We show that in the ordered flocking phase this confined active vectorial fluid is characterized by extensive boundary layers, as opposed to the finite ones usually observed in confined scalar active matter. Moreover, a finite-size, fluctuation-induced contribution to the pressure on the wall emerges, which decays slowly and algebraically upon increasing the distance between the walls. We explain our findings - which display a certain degree of universality - within a hydrodynamic description of the density and velocity fields.

We investigate the dissipative phase transitions of the anisotropic quantum Rabi model with cavity decay and demonstrate that large spin fluctuations persist in the stationary state, having important consequences on the phase diagram and the critical properties. In the second-order phase transition to the superradiant phase, there is a significant suppression of the order parameter and the appearance of nonuniversal factors, which directly reflect the spin populations. Furthermore, upon entering a parameter regime where mean-field theory predicts a tricritical phase, we find a first-order phase transition due to the unexpected collapse of superradiance. An accurate and physically transparent description going beyond mean-field theory is established by combining exact numerical simulations, the cumulant expansion, and analytical approximations based on reduced master equations and an effective equilibrium theory. Our findings, compared to the conventional thermodynamic limit of the Dicke model, indicate a general tendency of forming extreme nonequilibrium states in the single-spin system, thus have broad implications for dissipative phase transitions of few-body systems.

Nonstabilizerness describes the distance of a quantum state to its closest stabilizer state. It is - like entanglement - a necessary resource for a quantum advantage over classical computing. We study nonstabilizerness, quantified by stabilizer entropy, in a hybrid quantum circuit with projective measurements and a controlled injection of non-Clifford resources. We discover a phase transition between a power law and constant scaling of nonstabilizerness with system size controlled by the rate of measurements. The same circuit also exhibits a phase transition in entanglement that appears, however, at a different critical measurement rate. This mechanism shows how, from the viewpoint of a quantum advantage, hybrid circuits can host multiple distinct transitions where not only entanglement, but also other nonlinear properties of the density matrix come into play.

We numerically investigate the robustness against various perturbations of measurement-induced phase transition in monitored quantum Ising models in the no-click limit, where the dynamics is described by a non-Hermitian Hamiltonian. We study perturbations that break the integrability and/or the symmetry of the model, as well as modifications in the measurement protocol, characterizing the resulting chaos and lack of integrability through the dissipative spectral form factor. We show that while the measurement-induced phase transition and its properties appear to be broadly insensitive to lack of integrability and breaking of the Z2 symmetry, a modification of the measurement basis from the transverse to the longitudinal direction makes the phase transition disappear altogether.

We study nonequilibrium quantum dynamics of spin chains by employing principal component analysis on data sets of wave function snapshots and examine how information propagates within these data sets. The quantities we employ are derived from the spectrum of the sample second moment matrix, built directly from data sets. Our investigations on several interacting spin chains featuring distinct spin or energy transport reveal that the growth of data information spreading follows the same dynamical exponents as that of the underlying quantum transport of spin or energy. Specifically, our approach enables an easy, data-driven, and, importantly, interpretable diagnostic to track energy transport with a limited number of samples, which is usually challenging without any assumption on the Hamiltonian form. These observations are obtained at a modest finite-size and evolution time, which aligns with experimental and numerical constraints. Our framework directly applies to experimental quantum simulator data sets of dynamics in higher-dimensional systems, where classical simulation methods usually face significant limitations and apply equally to both near- and far-from-equilibrium quenches.

We investigate the robustness of the many-body localized (MBL) phase to the quantum-avalanche instability by studying the dynamics of a localized spin chain coupled to a T=∞ thermal bath through its leftmost site. By analyzing local magnetizations we estimate the size of the thermalized sector of the chain and find that it increases logarithmically slowly in time. This logarithmically slow propagation of the thermalization front allows us to lower-bound the slowest thermalization time, and find a broad parameter range where it scales fast enough with the system size that MBL is robust against thermalization induced by avalanches. The further finding that the imbalance - a global quantity measuring localization - thermalizes over a timescale that is exponential both in disorder strength and system size is in agreement with these results.

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.

Quantum Annealing (QA) relies on mixing two Hamiltonian terms, a simple driver and a complex problem Hamiltonian, in a linear combination. The time-dependent schedule for this mixing is often taken to be linear in time: improving on this linear choice is known to be essential and has proven to be difficult. Here, we present different techniques for improving on the linear-schedule QA along two directions, conceptually distinct but leading to similar outcomes: 1) the first approach consists of constructing a Trotter-digitized QA (dQA) with schedules parameterized in terms of Fourier modes or Chebyshev polynomials, inspired by the Chopped Random Basis algorithm for optimal control in continuous time; 2) the second approach is technically a Quantum Approximate Optimization Algorithm (QAOA), whose solutions are found iteratively using linear interpolation or expansion in Fourier modes. Both approaches emphasize finding smooth optimal schedule parameters, ultimately leading to hybrid quantum-classical variational algorithms of the alternating Hamiltonian Ansatz type. We apply these techniques to MaxCut problems on weighted 3-regular graphs with N = 14 sites, focusing on hard instances that exhibit a small spectral gap, for which a standard linear-schedule QA performs poorly. We characterize the physics behind the optimal protocols for both the dQA and QAOA approaches, discovering shortcuts to adiabaticity-like dynamics. Furthermore, we study the transferability of such smooth solutions among hard instances of MaxCut at different circuit depths. Finally, we show that the smoothness pattern of these protocols obtained in a digital setting enables us to adapt them to continuous-time evolution, contrarily to generic non-smooth solutions. This procedure results in an optimized QA schedule that is implementable on analog devices.

The interaction-driven transition between quantum spin Hall and Mott insulators in the Bernevig, Hughes, and Zhang model is studied by dynamical cluster approximation, and found to be accompanied by the emergence of Green's function zeros already in the quantum spin Hall regime. The nontrivial interplay between Green's function poles and zeros leads to an exotic quantum spin Hall insulator exhibiting two chiral branches of edge Green's function poles and one of zeros. When symmetry breaking is allowed, a nontopological excitonic insulator is found to intrude between quantum spin Hall and Mott insulators. We find evidence that excitons in the Mott insulator, which become soft at the transition to the excitonic insulator, are actually bound states between valence and conduction bands of Green's function zeros, rather than between lower and upper Hubbard bands.

Hawking's discovery that black holes can evaporate through radiation emission has posed a number of questions that with time became fundamental hallmarks for a quantum theory of gravity. The most famous one is likely the information paradox, which finds an elegant explanation in the Page argument suggesting that a black hole and its radiation can be effectively represented by a random state of qubits. Leveraging the same assumption, we ponder the extent to which a black hole may display emergent symmetries, employing the entanglement asymmetry as a modern, information-based indicator of symmetry breaking. We find that for a random state devoid of any symmetry, a U(1) symmetry emerges and it is exact in the thermodynamic limit before the Page time. At the Page time, the entanglement asymmetry shows a finite jump to a large value. Our findings imply that the emitted radiation is symmetric up to the Page time and then undergoes a sharp transition. Conversely the black hole is symmetric only after the Page time.