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    Boundary perturbation effects in quantum systems with conserved energy and continuous symmetry

    Qucheng Gao* and Xiao Chen†

    • Department of Physics, Boston College, Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts 02467, USA

    • *Contact author: gaoqc@bc.edu
    • †Contact author: chenaad@bc.edu

    Phys. Rev. B 113, 094308 – Published 16 March, 2026

    DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/5j2h-ftvc

    Abstract

    We investigate one-dimensional systems with both energy conservation and a continuous symmetry, focusing on the impact of a boundary perturbation that breaks the continuous symmetry. Our study reveals two distinct dynamical phases: one in which the corresponding charge exhibits extensive fluctuations, and another where the charge remains conserved. These phases appear in both free and interacting models. We interpret this behavior through a boundary-induced pumping mechanism, which estimates the amplitude connecting two degenerate states from different charge sectors via a local charge-nonconserving operator. In the Floquet setting, we show that the frozen phase can survive at high driving frequencies but vanishes at low frequencies. This phenomenon is exact in free-fermion systems in the thermodynamic limit, but in interacting systems it appears only at finite system size. The emergence of the charge-frozen phase is attributed to effective energy conservation, and we demonstrate that this phase disappears when effective energy conservation is broken or replaced by other symmetries.

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