Publications

We have developed a technique combining the accuracy of quantum Monte Carlo in describing the electron correlation with the efficiency of a machine learning potential (MLP). We use kernel regression in combination with the smooth overlap of atomic position (SOAP) features, implemented here in a very efficient way. The key ingredients are as follows: (i) a sparsification technique, based on farthest point sampling, ensuring generality and transferability of our MLPs, and (ii) the so-called Δ-learning, allowing a small training data set, a fundamental property for highly accurate but computationally demanding calculations, such as the ones based on quantum Monte Carlo. As an application we present a benchmark study of the liquid-liquid transition of high-pressure hydrogen and show the quality of our MLP, by emphasizing the importance of high accuracy for this very debated subject, where experiments are difficult in the laboratory, and theory is still far from being conclusive.

We study the quantum dynamics of Josephson-junction arrays. We find isolated groups of low-entanglement eigenstates that persist even when the Josephson interaction is strong enough to destroy the overall organization of the spectrum in multiplets, and a perturbative description is no longer possible. These eigenstates lie in the inner part of the spectrum, far from the spectral edge, and provide a weak ergodicity breaking, reminiscent of the quantum scars. Due to the presence of these eigenstates, initializing with a charge-density-wave state, the system does not thermalize and the charge-density-wave order persists for long times. Considering global ergodicity probes, we find that the system tends toward more ergodicity for increasing system size: The parameter range where the bulk of the eigenstates look nonergodic shrinks for increasing system size. We study two geometries, a one-dimensional chain and a two-leg ladder. In the latter case, adding a magnetic flux makes the system more ergodic.

Breakdown of Landau's hypothesis of adiabatic continuation from noninteracting to fully interacting electrons is commonly believed to bring about a violation of Luttinger's theorem. Here, we elucidate what may go wrong in the proof of Luttinger's theorem. The analysis provides a simple way to correct Luttinger's expression of the electron number in single-band models where perturbation theory breaks down through the birth of a Luttinger surface without symmetry breaking. In those cases, we find that the Fermi volume only accounts for the doping away from half-filling. In the hypothetical circumstance of a non-symmetry-breaking Mott insulator with a Luttinger surface, our analysis predicts the noteworthy existence of quasiparticles whose Fermi surface is just the Luttinger one. Therefore, those quasiparticles can be legitimately regarded as spinons, and the Mott insulator with a Luttinger surface as realization of a spin-liquid insulator.

Modeling noisy oscillations of active systems is one of the current challenges in physics and biology. Because the physical mechanisms of such processes are often difficult to identify, we propose a linear stochastic model driven by a non-Markovian bistable noise that is capable of generating self-sustained periodic oscillation. We derive analytical predictions for most relevant dynamical and thermodynamic properties of the model. This minimal model turns out to describe accurately bistablelike oscillatory motion of hair bundles in bullfrog sacculus, extracted from experimental data. Based on and in agreement with these data, we estimate the power required to sustain such active oscillations to be of the order of 100 kBT per oscillation cycle.

Discrete time crystals represent a paradigmatic nonequilibrium phase of periodically driven matter. Protecting its emergent spatiotemporal order necessitates a mechanism that hinders the spreading of defects, such as localization of domain walls in disordered quantum spin chains. In this work, we establish the effectiveness of a different mechanism arising in clean spin chains: the confinement of domain walls into "mesonic"bound states. We consider translationally invariant quantum Ising chains periodically kicked at arbitrary frequency, and we discuss two possible routes to domain-wall confinement: longitudinal fields and interactions beyond nearest neighbors. We study the impact of confinement on the order-parameter evolution by constructing domain-wall-conserving effective Hamiltonians and analyzing the resulting dynamics of domain walls. On the one hand, we show that for arbitrary driving frequency, the symmetry-breaking-induced confining potential gets effectively averaged out by the drive, leading to deconfined dynamics. On the other hand, we rigorously prove that increasing the range R of spin-spin interactions Ji,j beyond nearest neighbors enhances the order-parameter lifetime exponentially in R. Our theory predictions are corroborated by a combination of exact and matrix-product-state simulations for finite and infinite chains, respectively. The long-lived stability of spatiotemporal order identified in this work does not rely on Floquet prethermalization nor on eigenstate order, but rather on the nonperturbative origin of vacuum-decay processes. We point out the experimental relevance of this new mechanism for stabilizing a long-lived time-crystalline response in Rydberg-dressed spin chains.

We study the behavior of the mutual information (MI) in various quadratic fermionic chains, with and without pairing terms and both with short- and long-range hoppings. The models considered include the short-range limit and long-range versions of the Kitaev model as well, and also cases in which the area law for the entanglement entropy is - logarithmically or nonlogarithmically - violated. In all cases surveyed, when the area law is violated at most logarithmically, the MI is a monotonically increasing function of the conformal four-point ratio x. Where nonlogarithmic violations of the area law are present, nonmonotonic features can be observed in the MI, and the four-point ratio, as well as other natural combinations of the parameters, is found not to be sufficient to capture the whole structure of the MI with a collapse onto a single curve. We interpret this behavior as a sign that the structure of peaks is related to a nonuniversal spatial configuration of Bell pairs. For the model exhibiting a perfect volume law, the MI vanishes identically. For the Kitaev model the MI is vanishing for x→0 and it remains zero up to a finite x in the gapped case. In general, a larger range of the pairing corresponds to a reduction of the MI at small x. A discussion of the comparison with the results obtained by the anti-de Sitter/conformal field theory correspondence in the strong-coupling limit is presented.

Rényi entropies are conceptually valuable and experimentally relevant generalizations of the celebrated von Neumann entanglement entropy. After a quantum quench in a clean quantum many-body system they generically display a universal linear growth in time followed by saturation. While a finite subsystem is essentially at local equilibrium when the entanglement saturates, it is genuinely out of equilibrium in the growth phase. In particular, the slope of the growth carries vital information on the nature of the system's dynamics, and its characterization is a key objective of current research. Here we show that the slope of Rényi entropies can be determined by means of a spacetime duality transformation. In essence, we argue that the slope coincides with the stationary density of entropy of the model obtained by exchanging the roles of space and time. Therefore, very surprisingly, the slope of the entanglement is expressed as an equilibrium quantity. We use this observation to find an explicit exact formula for the slope of Rényi entropies in all integrable models treatable by thermodynamic Bethe ansatz and evolving from integrable initial states. Interestingly, this formula can be understood in terms of a quasiparticle picture only in the von Neumann limit.

Recent predictions for quantum-mechanical enhancements in the operation of small heat engines have raised renewed interest in their study both from a fundamental perspective and in view of applications. One essential question is whether collective effects may help to carry enhancements over larger scales, when increasing the number of systems composing the working substance of the engine. Such enhancements may consider not only power and efficiency, that is, its performance, but, additionally, its constancy, that is, the stability of the engine with respect to unavoidable environmental fluctuations. We explore this issue by introducing a many-body quantum heat engine model composed by spin pairs working in continuous operation. We study how power, efficiency, and constancy scale with the number of spins composing the engine and introduce a well-defined macroscopic limit where analytical expressions are obtained. Our results predict power enhancements, in both finite-size and macroscopic cases, for a broad range of system parameters and temperatures, without compromising the engine efficiency, accompanied by coherence-enhanced constancy for finite sizes. We discuss these quantities in connection to thermodynamic uncertainty relations.

In the past decades, considerable efforts have been made to understand the critical features of both classical and quantum long-range (LR) interacting models. The case of the Berezinskii-Kosterlitz-Thouless (BKT) universality class, as in the two-dimensional (2D) classical XY model, is considerably complicated by the presence, for short-range interactions, of a line of renormalization group fixed points. In this paper, we discuss a field-theoretical treatment of the 2D XY model with LR couplings, and we compare it with results from the self-consistent harmonic approximation. These methods lead to a rich phase diagram, where both power law BKT scaling and spontaneous symmetry breaking appear for the same (intermediate) decay rates of LR interactions. We also discuss the Villain approximation for the 2D XY model with power law couplings, providing hints that, in the LR regime, it fails to reproduce the correct critical behavior. The obtained results are then applied to the LR quantum XXZ spin chain at zero temperature. We discuss the relation between the phase diagrams of the two models, and we give predictions about the scaling of the order parameter of the quantum chain close to the transition.

We study a driven-dissipative Bose-Hubbard model in the presence of two-particle losses and an incoherent single-particle drive on each lattice site, leading to a finite-density stationary state. Using dynamical mean-field theory (DMFT) and an impurity solver based on exact diagonalization of the associated Lindbladian, we investigate the regime of strong two-particle losses. Here a stationary-state quantum Zeno effect emerges, as can be seen in the on-site occupation and spectral function. We show that DMFT captures this effect through its self-consistent bath. We show that, in the deep Zeno regime, the bath structure simplifies, with the occupation of all bath sites except one becoming exponentially suppressed. As a result, an effective dissipative hard-core Bose-Hubbard dimer model emerges, where the auxiliary bath site has single-particle dissipation controlled by the Zeno dissipative scale.

We study the nonequilibrium steady-state of a fully-coupled network of N quantum harmonic oscillators, interacting with two thermal reservoirs. Given the long-range nature of the couplings, we consider two setups: one in which the number of particles coupled to the baths is fixed (intensive coupling) and one in which it is proportional to the size N (extensive coupling). In both cases, we compute analytically the heat fluxes and the kinetic temperature distributions using the nonequilibrium Green's function approach, both in the classical and quantum regimes. In the large N limit, we derive the asymptotic expressions of both quantities as a function of N and the temperature difference between the baths. We discuss a peculiar feature of the model, namely that the bulk temperature vanishes in the thermodynamic limit, due to a decoupling of the dynamics of the inner part of the system from the baths. At variance with the usual case, this implies that the steady-state depends on the initial state of the bulk particles. We also show that quantum effects are relevant only below a characteristic temperature that vanishes as 1/N. In the quantum low-temperature regime the energy flux is proportional to the universal quantum of thermal conductance.

We develop a general approach to compute the symmetry-resolved Rényi and von Neumann entanglement entropies (SREE) of thermodynamic macrostates in interacting integrable systems. Our method is based on a combination of the thermodynamic Bethe ansatz and the Gärtner-Ellis theorem from large deviation theory. We derive an explicit simple formula for the von Neumann SREE, which we show to coincide with the thermodynamic Yang-Yang entropy of an effective macrostate determined by the charge sector. Focusing on the XXZ Heisenberg spin chain, we test our result against iTEBD calculations for thermal states, finding good agreement. As an application, we provide analytic predictions for the asymptotic value of the SREE following a quantum quench.

We study the entanglement entropies of an interval on the infinite line in the free fermionic spinless Schrödinger field theory at finite density and zero temperature, which is a non-relativistic model with Lifshitz exponent z = 2. We prove that the entanglement entropies are finite functions of one dimensionless parameter proportional to the area of a rectangular region in the phase space determined by the Fermi momentum and the length of the interval. The entanglement entropy is a monotonically increasing function. By employing the properties of the prolate spheroidal wave functions of order zero or the asymptotic expansions of the tau function of the sine kernel, we find analytic expressions for the expansions of the entanglement entropies in the asymptotic regimes of small and large area of the rectangular region in the phase space. These expansions lead to prove that the analogue of the relativistic entropic C function is not monotonous. Extending our analyses to a class of free fermionic Lifshitz models labelled by their integer dynamical exponent z, we find that the parity of this exponent determines the properties of the bipartite entanglement for an interval on the line.

Non-differentiable potentials, such as the V-shaped (linear) potential, appear in various areas of physics. For example, the effective action for branons in the framework of the brane world scenario contains a Liouville-type interaction, i.e., an exponential of the V-shaped function. Another example is coming from particle physics when the standard model Higgs potential is replaced by a periodic self-interaction of an N-component scalar field which depends on the length, thus it is O(N) symmetric. We first compare classical and quantum dynamics near non-analytic points and discuss in this context the role of quantum fluctuations. We then study the renormalisation of such potentials, focusing on the Exact Wilsonian Renormalisation approach, and we discuss how quantum fluctuations smoothen the bare singularity of the potential. Applications of these results to the non-differentiable effective branon potential and to the O(N) models when the spatial dimension is varied and to the O(N) extension of the sine-Gordon model in (1+1) dimensions are presented.

We discuss how to calculate non-equilibrium universal amplitude ratios in the functional renormalization group approach, extending its applicability. In particular, we focus on the critical relaxation of the Ising model with non-conserved dynamics (model A) and calculate the universal amplitude ratio associated with the fluctuation-dissipation ratio of the order parameter, considering a critical quench from a high-temperature initial condition. Our predictions turn out to be in good agreement with previous perturbative renormalization-group calculations and Monte Carlo simulations.

We put forward a phenomenological theory for entanglement dynamics in monitored quantum many-body systems with well-defined quasiparticles. Within this theory entanglement is carried by ballistically propagating non-Hermitian quasiparticles which are stochastically reset by the measurement protocol with a rate given by their finite inverse lifetime. We write down a renewal equation for the statistics of the entanglement entropy and show that, depending on the spectrum of quasiparticle decay rates, different entanglement scalings can arise and even sharp entanglement phase transitions. When applied to a quantum Ising chain where the transverse magnetization is measured by quantum jumps, our theory predicts a critical phase with logarithmic scaling of the entanglement, an area-law phase and a continuous phase transition between them, with an effective central charge vanishing as a square root at the transition point. We compare these predictions with exact numerical calculations on the same model and find an excellent agreement.

We investigate the symmetry resolution of entanglement in the presence of long-range couplings. To this end, we study the symmetry-resolved entanglement entropy in the ground state of a fermionic chain that has dimerised long-range hoppings with power-like decaying amplitude - a long-range generalisation of the Su-Schrieffer-Heeger model. This is a system that preserves the number of particles. The entropy of each symmetry sector is calculated via the charged moments of the reduced density matrix. We exploit some recent results on block Toeplitz determinants generated by a discontinuous symbol to obtain analytically the asymptotic behaviour of the charged moments and of the symmetry-resolved entropies for a large subsystem. At leading order we find entanglement equipartition, but comparing with the short-range counterpart its breaking occurs at a different order and it does depend on the hopping amplitudes.

We investigate the non-equilibrium dynamics of a one-dimensional spin-1/2 XXZ model at zero-temperature in the regime |∆| < 1, initially prepared in a product state with two domain walls i.e, |↓ . . . ↓↑ . . . ↑↓ . . . ↓〉. At early times, the two domain walls evolve independently and only after a calculable time a non-trivial interplay between the two emerges and results in the occurrence of a split Fermi sea. For ∆ = 0, we derive exact asymptotic results for the magnetization and the spin current by using a semi-classical Wigner function approach, and we exactly determine the spreading of entanglement entropy exploiting the recently developed tools of quantum fluctuating hydrodynamics. In the interacting case, we analytically solve the Generalized Hydrodynamics equation providing exact expressions for the conserved quantities. We display some numerical results for the entanglement entropy also in the interacting case and we propose a conjecture for its asymptotic value.

We review seven models which consistently couple quantum matter and (Newtonian) gravity in a nonstandard way. For each of them, we present the underlying motivations, the main equations, and, when available, a comparison with experimental data.

We propose to exploit currently available tunnel ferromagnetic Josephson junctions to realize a hybrid superconducting qubit. We show that the characteristic hysteretic behavior of the ferromagnetic barrier provides an alternative and intrinsically digital tuning of the qubit frequency by means of magnetic field pulses. To illustrate functionalities and limitation of the device, we discuss the coupling to a readout resonator and the effect of magnetic fluctuations. The possibility to use the qubit as a noise detector and its relevance to investigate the subtle interplay of magnetism and superconductivity is envisaged.