Impact of Dissipation on Universal Fluctuation Dynamics in Open Quantum Systems

Exact Solution of Bipartite Fluctuations in One-Dimensional Fermions

Emergence of hydrodynamics in quantum many-body systems has recently garnered growing interest. The recent experiment of ultracold atoms [J. F. Wienand et al., Nat. Phys. 20, 1732 (2024)NPAHAX1745-247310.1038/s41567-024-02611-z] studied emergent hydrodynamics in hard-core bosons using a bipartite fluctuation, which quantifies how the particle number fluctuates in a subsystem. In this Letter, we theoretically study the variance of a bipartite fluctuation in one-dimensional noninteracting fermionic dynamics starting from an alternating state, deriving the exact solution of the variance and its asymptotic linear growth law for the long-time dynamics. To compare the theoretical prediction with the experiment, we generalize our exact solution by incorporating the incompleteness of the initial alternating state, deriving the general linear growth law analytically. We find that it shows good agreement with the experimentally observed variance growth without any fitting parameters. Furthermore, we estimate a timescale for the local equilibration using our exact solution, finding that the timescale is independent of the initial incompleteness. To investigate the interaction effect, we implement numerical studies for the variance growth in interacting fermions, which has yet to be explored experimentally. As a result, we find that the presence of interactions breaks the linear variance growth derived in the noninteracting fermions. Our exact solutions and numerical findings here lay a foundation for growing bipartite fluctuations in quantum many-body dynamics.

Power-Law Entanglement and Hilbert Space Fragmentation in Nonreciprocal Quantum Circuits

Quantum circuits utilizing measurement to evolve a quantum wave function offer a new and rich playground to engineer unconventional entanglement dynamics. Here, we introduce a hybrid, nonreciprocal setup featuring a quantum circuit, whose updates are conditioned on the state of a classical dynamical agent. In our example the circuit is represented by a Majorana quantum chain controlled by a classical N-state Potts chain undergoing pair flips. The local orientation of the classical spins controls whether randomly drawn local measurements on the quantum chain are allowed or not. This imposes a dynamical kinetic constraint on the entanglement growth, described by the transfer matrix of an N-colored loop model. It yields an equivalent description of the circuit by an SU(N)-symmetric Temperley-Lieb Hamiltonian or by a kinetically constrained surface growth model for an N-component height field. For N=2, we find a diffusive growth of the half-chain entanglement toward a stationary profile S(L)∼L^{1/2} for L sites. For N≥3, the kinetic constraints impose Hilbert space fragmentation, yielding subdiffusive growth toward S(L)∼L^{0.57}. This showcases how the control by a classical dynamical agent can enrich the entanglement dynamics in quantum circuits, paving a route toward novel entanglement dynamics in nonreciprocal hybrid circuit architectures.

Quantum Criticality in Open Quantum Spin Chains with Nonreciprocity

We investigate the impact of nonreciprocity on universality and critical phenomena in open quantum interacting many-body systems. Nonreciprocal open quantum systems often have an exotic spectral sensitivity to boundary conditions, known as the Liouvillian skin effect (LSE). By considering an open quantum XXZ spin chain that exhibits LSE, we demonstrate the existence of a universal scaling regime that is not affected by the presence of the LSE. We resolve the critical exponents, which differ from those of free fermions, via tensor network methods and demonstrate that observables exhibit a universal scaling collapse, irrespective of the reciprocity. We find that the LSE only becomes relevant when a healing length scale ξ_{heal} at the system's edge (which is different from the localization length of the eigenstate of the Liouvillian) exceeds the system size, allowing edge properties to dominate the physics. We expect this result to be a generic feature of nonreciprocal models in the vicinity of a critical point. The driven-dissipative quantum criticality we observe has no classical analog and stems from the existence of multiple dark states.