Spontaneous symmetry breaking (SSB) in statistical physics is a macroscopic collective phenomenon. For the paradigmatic $Q$-state Potts model it means a transition from the disordered color-symmetric phase to an ordered phase in which one color dominates. Existing mean field theories imply that SSB in the microcanonical statistical ensemble (with energy being the control parameter) should be a continuous process. Here we study microcanonical SSB on the random-graph Potts model and discover that the entropy is a kinked function of energy. This kink leads to a discontinuous phase transition at certain energy density value, characterized by a jump in the density of the dominant color and a jump in the microcanonical temperature. This discontinuous SSB in random graphs is confirmed by microcanonical Monte Carlo simulations, and it is also observed in bond-diluted finite-size lattice systems.

The difficulty to simulate the dynamics of open quantum systems resides in their coupling to many-body reservoirs with exponentially large Hilbert space. Applying a tensor network approach in the time domain, we demonstrate that effective small reservoirs can be defined and used for modeling open quantum dynamics. The key element of our technique is the timeline reservoir network (TRN), which contains all the information on the reservoir’s characteristics, in particular, the memory effects timescale. The TRN has a one-dimensional tensor network structure, which can be effectively approximated in full analogy with the matrix product approximation of spin-chain states. We derive the sufficient bond dimension in the approximated TRN with a reduced set of physical parameters: coupling strength, reservoir correlation time, minimal timescale, and the system’s number of degrees of freedom interacting with the environment. The bond dimension can be viewed as a measure of the open dynamics complexity. Simulation is based on the semigroup dynamics of the system and effective reservoir of finite dimension. We provide an illustrative example showing the scope for new numerical and machine learning-based methods for open quantum systems.

We compute analytically the maximal rates of distillation of quantum coherence under strictly incoherent operations (SIO) and physically incoherent operations (PIO), showing that they coincide for all states, and providing a complete description of the phenomenon of bound coherence. In particular, we establish a simple, analytically computable necessary and sufficient criterion for the asymptotic distillability under SIO and PIO. We use this result to show that almost every quantum state is undistillable—only pure states as well as states whose density matrix contains a rank-one submatrix allow for coherence distillation under SIO or PIO, while every other quantum state exhibits bound coherence. This demonstrates the fundamental operational limitations of SIO and PIO in the resource theory of quantum coherence. We show that the fidelity of distillation of a single bit of coherence under SIO can be efficiently computed as a semidefinite program, and investigate the generalization of this result to provide an understanding of asymptotically achievable distillation fidelity.

We demonstrate ballistic spin transport of an integrable unitary quantum circuit, which can be understood either as a paradigm of an integrable periodically driven (Floquet) spin chain, or as a Trotterized anisotropic ($XXZ$) Heisenberg spin-$1/2$ model. We construct an analytic family of quasilocal conservation laws that break the spin-reversal symmetry and compute a lower bound on the spin Drude weight, which is found to be a fractal function of the anisotropy parameter. Extensive numerical simulations of spin transport suggest that this fractal lower bound is in fact tight.

We introduce a method for the search of parent Hamiltonians of input wave functions based on the structure of their reduced density matrix. The two key elements of our recipe are an ansatz on the relation between the reduced density matrix and parent Hamiltonian that is exact at the field theory level, and a minimization procedure on the space of relative entropies, which is particularly convenient due to its convexity. As examples, we show how our method correctly reconstructs the parent Hamiltonian correspondent to several nontrivial ground state wave functions, including conformal and symmetry-protected-topological phases, and quantum critical points of two-dimensional antiferromagnets described by strongly coupled field theories. Our results show the entanglement structure of ground state wave functions considerably simplifies the search for parent Hamiltonians.

We study the quasiparticle excitation and quench dynamics of the one-dimensional transverse-field Ising model with power-law ($1/r^{\alpha }$) interactions. We find that long-range interactions give rise to a confining potential, which couples pairs of domain walls (kinks) into bound quasiparticles, analogous to mesonic states in high-energy physics. We show that these quasiparticles have signatures in the dynamics of order parameters following a global quench, and the Fourier spectrum of these order parameters can be exploited as a direct probe of the masses of the confined quasiparticles. We introduce a two-kink model to qualitatively explain the phenomenon of long-range-interaction-induced confinement and to quantitatively predict the masses of the bound quasiparticles. Furthermore, we illustrate that these quasiparticle states can lead to slow thermalization of one-point observables for certain initial states. Our work is readily applicable to current trapped-ion experiments.

Nonequilibrium sampling is potentially much more versatile than its equilibrium counterpart, but it comes with challenges because the invariant distribution is not typically known when the dynamics breaks detailed balance. Here, we derive a generic importance sampling technique that leverages the statistical power of configurations transported by nonequilibrium trajectories and can be used to compute averages with respect to arbitrary target distributions. As a dissipative reweighting scheme, the method can be viewed in relation to the annealed importance sampling (AIS) method and the related Jarzynski equality. Unlike AIS, our approach gives an unbiased estimator, with a provably lower variance than directly estimating the average of an observable. We also establish a direct relation between a dynamical quantity, the dissipation, and the volume of phase space, from which we can compute quantities such as the density of states and Bayes factors. We illustrate the properties of estimators relying on this sampling technique in the context of density of state calculations, showing that it scales favorable with dimensionality—in particular, we show that it can be used to compute the phase diagram of the mean-field Ising model from a single nonequilibrium trajectory. We also demonstrate the robustness and efficiency of the approach with an application to a Bayesian model comparison problem of the type encountered in astrophysics and machine learning.

We report two results complementing the second law of thermodynamics for Markovian open quantum systems coupled to multiple reservoirs with different temperatures and chemical potentials. First, we derive a nonequilibrium free energy inequality providing an upper bound for a maximum power output, which for systems with inhomogeneous temperature is not equivalent to the Clausius inequality. Second, we derive local Clausius and free energy inequalities for subsystems of a composite system. These inequalities differ from the total system one by the presence of an information-related contribution and build the ground for thermodynamics of quantum information processing. Our theory is used to study an autonomous Maxwell demon.

Universal phenomena far from equilibrium exhibit additional independent scaling exponents and functions as compared to thermal universal behavior. For the example of an ultracold Bose gas we simulate nonequilibrium transport processes in a universal scaling regime and show how they lead to the breaking of the fluctuation-dissipation relation. As a consequence, the scaling of spectral functions (commutators) and statistical correlations (anticommutators) between different points in time and space become linearly independent with distinct dynamic scaling exponents. As a macroscopic signature of this phenomenon, we identify a transport peak in the statistical two-point correlator, which is absent in the spectral function showing the quasiparticle peaks of the Bose gas.

Contextuality is a fundamental nonclassical property of quantum theory, which has recently been proven to be a key resource for achieving quantum speed-ups in some leading models of quantum computation. However, which of the forms of contextuality, and how much thereof, are required to obtain a speed-up in an arbitrary model of quantum computation remains unclear. In this Letter, we show that the relation between contextuality and a computational advantage is more complicated than previously thought. We achieve this by proving that generalized contextuality is present even within the simplest subset of quantum operations, the so-called single-qubit stabilizer theory, which offers no computational advantage and was previously believed to be completely noncontextual. However, the contextuality of the single-qubit stabilizer theory can be confined to transformations. Therefore, our result also demonstrates that the commonly considered prepare-and-measure scenarios (which ignore transformations) do not fully capture the contextuality of quantum theory.

The problem of finding the ground state energy of a Hamiltonian using a quantum computer is currently solved using either the quantum phase estimation (QPE) or variational quantum eigensolver (VQE) algorithms. For precision $\epsilon$, QPE requires $O(1)$ repetitions of circuits with depth $O(1/\epsilon )$, whereas each expectation estimation subroutine within VQE requires $O(1/{\epsilon }^2)$ samples from circuits with depth $O(1)$. We propose a generalized VQE algorithm that interpolates between these two regimes via a free parameter $\alpha \in [0,1]$, which can exploit quantum coherence over a circuit depth of $O(1/{\epsilon }^{\alpha })$ to reduce the number of samples to $O(1/{\epsilon }^{2(1-\alpha )})$. Along the way, we give a new routine for expectation estimation under limited quantum resources that is of independent interest.

We investigate the localization of two incoherent point sources with arbitrary angular and axial separations in the paraxial approximation. By using quantum metrology techniques, we show that a simultaneous estimation of the two separations is achievable by a single quantum measurement, with a precision saturating the ultimate limit stemming from the quantum Cramér-Rao bound. Such a precision is not degraded in the subwavelength regime, thus overcoming the traditional limitations of classical direct imaging derived from Rayleigh’s criterion. Our results are qualitatively independent of the point spread function of the imaging system, and quantitatively illustrated in detail for the Gaussian instance. This analysis may have relevant applications in three-dimensional surface measurements.

We demonstrate that linear combinations of subregion entropies with canceling boundary terms, commonly used to calculate the topological entanglement entropy, may suffer from spurious nontopological contributions even in models with zero correlation length. These spurious contributions are due to a specific kind of long-range string order and persist throughout certain subsystem symmetry-protected phases. We introduce an entropic quantity that measures the presence of such order, and hence should serve as an order parameter for the aforementioned phases.

We show that every entangled state provides an advantage in ancilla-assisted bi- and multichannel discrimination that singles out its degree of entanglement, quantified in terms of the Schmidt number. The Schmidt-number robustness provides a compelling quantification of such an advantage, and, remarkably, the well-known robustness of entanglement exactly provides the largest multiplicative advantage an entangled state can provide compared to the case where no ancilla is used in a channel discrimination task.

One of the most important characteristics of a quantum graph is the average density of resonances, $\rho =(\mathcal{L}/\pi )$, where $\mathcal{L}$ denotes the length of the graph. This is a very robust measure. It does not depend on the number of vertices in a graph and holds also for most of the boundary conditions at the vertices. Graphs obeying this characteristic are called Weyl graphs. Using microwave networks that simulate quantum graphs we show that there exist graphs that do not adhere to this characteristic. Such graphs are called non-Weyl graphs. For standard coupling conditions we demonstrate that the transition from a Weyl graph to a non-Weyl graph occurs if we introduce a balanced vertex. A vertex of a graph is called balanced if the numbers of infinite leads and internal edges meeting at a vertex are the same. Our experimental results confirm the theoretical predictions of [E. B. Davies and A. Pushnitski, Analysis and PDE 4, 729 (2011)] and are in excellent agreement with the numerical calculations yielding the resonances of the networks.

We formally extend the notion of Markov order to open quantum processes by accounting for the instruments used to probe the system of interest at different times. Our description recovers the classical property in the appropriate limit: when the stochastic process is classical and the instruments are noninvasive, i.e., restricted to orthogonal, projective measurements. We then prove that there do not exist non-Markovian quantum processes that have finite Markov order with respect to all possible instruments; the same process exhibits distinct memory effects when probed by different instruments. This naturally leads to a relaxed definition of quantum Markov order with respect to specified instrument sequences. The memory effects captured by different choices of instruments vary dramatically, providing a rich landscape for future exploration.