All Publications

We investigate the equilibrium properties of a quantum Brownian particle moving in a periodic potential, specifically addressing the nature of the dissipation-driven Schmid transition in the Ohmic regime. By employing world-line Monte Carlo in the path-integral formalism and introducing a specific binary order parameter, we demonstrate that the transition belongs to the Berezinskii-Kosterlitz-Thouless universality class. This classification is substantiated through finite-size scaling analysis that reveals the characteristic logarithmic decay of the correlation functions associated with the order parameter at the critical point. Quantum phase transition turns out to be extremely fragile: it disappears in both over- and sub-Ohmic dissipation regimes. Crucially, we find that the presence of the periodic potential does not alter the localization properties in the sub-Ohmic and super-Ohmic regimes, where the system exhibits the same qualitative behavior as the free quantum Brownian particle. These findings highlight that the emergence of critical behavior is strictly governed by the low-frequency form of the environmental spectral function, which determines the long-range temporal decay of the dissipative kernel.

The evolution of a system coupled to baths is commonly described by a master equation that, in the long-time limit, yields a steady-state density matrix. However, when the same evolution is unraveled into quantum trajectories, it is possible to observe a transition in the scaling of entanglement within the system as the system-bath coupling increases—a phenomenon that is invisible in the trajectory-averaged reduced density matrix of the system. Here, we go beyond the paradigm of trajectories from master equations and explore whether a qualitatively analogous entanglement-scaling transition emerges in a single unitary evolution of the combined system-bath setup, without monitoring the dynamics of the system. We investigate the scaling of entanglement in a unitary quantum setup composed of a two-dimensional lattice of free fermions, where each site is coupled to a fermionic bath. As the system-bath coupling increases, the logarithmic fermionic negativity reveals an entanglement transition from logarithmic-law to area-law scaling. This occurs while the system’s steady-state properties are trivial, highlighting that the signatures of these different scalings are within the bath-bath correlations. Evidence of the transition is also found in the mutual information and the correlations of the full system-bath setup, suggesting that the entanglement transition is underpinned by a change in the spatial structure of quantum information.

We introduce a model of an active quantum particle and discuss its properties. The particle has a set of internal states that mediate exchanges of heat with external reservoirs. Heat is then converted into motion by means of a spin-orbit term that couples internal and translational degrees of freedom. The quantum features of the active particle manifest both in the motion and in the heat-to-motion conversion. Furthermore, the stochastic nature of heat exchanges impacts the motion of the active particle and fluctuations can be orders of magnitude larger than the average values. The combination of spin-orbit interaction under nonequilibrium driving may bring active matter into the realm of cold atomic gases where our proposal can be implemented.

We propose a new theoretical method to describe the monitored dynamics of bosonic many-body systems based on the concept of the most likely trajectory. We show how such trajectory can be identified from the probability distribution of quantum trajectories, i.e. measurement readouts, and how it successfully captures the monitored dynamics beyond the average state. We prove the method to be exact in the case of Gaussian theories and then extend it to the interacting Sine-Gordon model. Although no longer exact in this framework, the method captures the dynamics through a self-consistent time-dependent harmonic approximation and reveals an entanglement phase transition in the steady state from an area-law to a logarithmic-law scaling.

Understanding different aspects of time is at the core of many areas in theoretical physics. Minimal models of continuous stochastic and quantum clocks have been proposed to explore fundamental limitations on the performance of timekeeping devices. Owing to the level of complexity in the clock structure and its energy consumption, such devices show trade-offs whose characterization remains an open challenge. Indeed, even conceptual designs for thermodynamically efficient quantum clocks are not yet well understood. In condensed matter theory, time crystals were found as an exciting new phase of matter featuring oscillations in (pseudo) equilibrium with first experimental observations appearing recently. This naturally prompts the question: Can time crystals be used as quantum clocks, and what is their performance from a thermodynamic perspective? We answer this question and find that quantum time crystals are indeed genuine quantum clocks with a performance enhanced by the spontaneous breaking of time-translation symmetry.

We propose a semiclassical framework for solving open quantum dynamics in driven-dissipative spin systems. Our method consists of generalized spin-wave approximations tailored to describing quantum trajectories unraveled from the master equation, and it generically applies to regimes beyond the reach of conventional spin-wave theories, including short-range interactions and local quantum jumps, enabling the efficient simulation of large-scale interacting spins. We illustrate the versatility of our framework by studying a variable-range driven-dissipative Ising model on a two-dimensional lattice. When the dissipation acts along the drive axis, we find a continuous phase transition breaking the Z2 symmetry, and we demonstrate that the interaction range, when tuned from fully connected to nearest-neighbor, profoundly alters the universality class of the criticality. With the dissipation along the interaction axis, we show the emergence of a first-order transition. Demonstrated with both state-diffusion and quantum-jump types of trajectory dynamics, our framework provides a powerful toolbox for the efficient semiclassical description of nonequilibrium dynamics and many-body phases in spin systems.

We study Andreev-mediated transport and current fluctuations in interacting normal-superconducting quantum-dot systems. Using a generalized master equation based on real-time diagrammatics and full counting statistics, we compute the steady-state current, zero-frequency noise, and rate of entropy production in the large superconducting-gap limit. We show how Coulomb interactions modify Andreev-mediated transport by renormalizing resonant conditions and suppressing superconducting coherence, leading to a pronounced reduction of current precision even when average currents are only weakly affected. These effects are particularly evident at high temperatures, where conventional Coulomb-blockade features are thermally smeared while fluctuation properties remain highly sensitive. By analyzing thermodynamic uncertainty relations, we demonstrate that violations of the quantum bound present in the noninteracting regime are progressively reduced and eventually suppressed as interactions increase, whereas the recently proposed hybrid bound remains satisfied. Our results clarify how Coulomb interactions and nonequilibrium fluctuations jointly determine transport properties in hybrid superconducting devices, and establish current precision as a robust benchmark for interacting Andreev transport beyond the noninteracting limit.

Stability and efficiency are mutually exclusive in a thermodynamic process, e.g., in a thermal machine. Any effort to reduce the fluctuations of a certain output quantity is necessarily accompanied by an increase of entropy production, therefore lowering its efficiency. This interplay is beautifully captured by the so-called thermodynamic uncertainty relations (TURs), which set a lower bound on the relative uncertainty of a current for a given rate of entropy production. Their status in hybrid normal-superconducting (N-S) devices has remained unsettled. We show that, in the subgap regime, departures from the normal quantum TUR are governed by macroscopic superconducting coherence quantified by the pair amplitude, and that introducing a dephasing probe suppresses this coherence and restores the bound. We further derive a hybrid quantum TUR that is general for two-terminal N-S junctions in the Andreev regime: the inequality is never violated, is saturated only at vanishing current, and is related to the normal quantum bound under the replacement e→2e. For N-S quantum dot and Cooper-pair-splitter systems, we compute current and noise and show that deviations from the normal bound track the pair amplitude on the central region. The results establish a direct link between superconducting macroscopic coherence and nonequilibrium fluctuations and supply a general bound for the Andreev regime.

We show that states obtained from deep random Clifford circuits doped with non-Clifford phase gates (including T gates and T gates) can be disentangled completely, provided the number of non-Clifford gates is smaller or approximately equal to the number of qubits. This implies that Pauli expectation values of such states can be efficiently simulated classically, despite them exhibiting both extensive entanglement and extensive nonstabilizerness. We prove this result analytically using a quantum error correction formulation, demonstrate its applicability numerically, and discuss consequences for the disentanglability of states generated through Hamiltonian dynamics. We show that this result implies a novel representation of approximate state designs that can also facilitate their efficient generation, and we propose a novel quantum circuit compression scheme for Clifford circuits doped with non-Clifford phase gates.

Measurement-induced phases exhibit unconventional dynamics as emergent collective phenomena, yet their behavior in tailored interacting systems – crucial for quantum technologies – remains less understood. We develop a systematic toolbox to analyze monitored dynamics in long-range interacting systems, relevant to platforms like trapped ions and Rydberg atoms. Our method extends spin-wave theory to general dynamical generators at the quantum trajectory level, enabling access to a broader class of states than approaches based on density matrices. This allows efficient simulation of large-scale interacting spins and captures nonlinear dynamical features such as entanglement and trajectory correlations. We showcase the versatility of our framework by exploring entanglement phase transitions in a monitored spin system with power-law interactions in one and two dimensions, where the entanglement scaling changes from logarithm to volume law as the interaction range shortens, and by dwelling on how our method mitigates experimental post-selection challenges in detecting monitored quantum phases.

We study monitored quantum dynamics of infinite-range interacting bosonic systems in the thermodynamic limit. We show that under semiclassical assumptions, the quantum fluctuations along single monitored trajectories adopt a deterministic limit for both quantum-jump and state-diffusion unravelings, and they can be exactly solved. In particular, the hierarchical structure of the equations of motion explains the coincidence of entanglement criticalities and dissipative phase transitions found in previous finite-size numerical studies. We illustrate the findings on a Bose-Hubbard dimer and a collective spin system.

A key challenge in observing measurement-induced phase transitions is the mitigation of the post-selection barrier, which causes the reproducibility of specific sequences of measurement readouts - the trajectory - to be exponentially small in system size. Recent studies suggest that some classes of monitored infinite-range systems alleviate this problem by exhibiting a fast saturation of entanglement, resulting in only a polynomial post-selection overhead. This paper answers whether this feature is inherent in infinite-range systems, due to their underlying semiclassical dynamics. We consider three experimentally relevant monitored models: a Tavis-Cummings model, a Superradiance model, and a Bose-Hubbard dimer, each exhibiting nontrivial monitored dynamics. We unveil the occurrence of entanglement phase transitions in these models, showing how the saturation time is strongly affected by bistability regions, which also prevent the mitigation of the post-selection barrier. Finally, we propose experimental realizations of these models, providing a discussion of post selection from an experimental perspective.

We investigate the use of a boundary time crystals (BTCs) as quantum sensors of AC fields. Boundary time crystals are non-equilibrium phases of matter in contact to an environment, for which a macroscopic fraction of the many-body system breaks the time translation symmetry. We find an enhanced sensitivity of the BTC when its spins are resonant with the applied AC field, as quantified by the quantum Fisher information (QFI). The QFI dynamics in this regime is shown to be captured by a relatively simple Ansatz consisting of an initial power-law growth and late-time exponential decay. We study the scaling of the Ansatz parameters with resources (encoding time and number of spins) and identify a moderate quantum enhancement in the sensor performance through comparison with classical QFI bounds. Investigating the precise source of this performance, we find that despite of its long coherence time and multipartite correlations (advantageous properties for quantum metrology), the entropic cost of the BTC (which grows indefinitely in the thermodynamic limit) hinders an optimal decoding of the AC field information. This result has implications for future candidates of quantum sensors in open system and we hope it will encourage future study into the role of entropy in quantum metrology.

These lecture notes discuss the recent theoretical advances in the understanding of open quantum many-body physics in platforms where both dissipative and coherent processes can be tuned and controlled to a high degree. We start by reviewing the theoretical frameworks and methods used to describe and tackle open quantum many-body systems. We then discuss the use of dissipative processes to engineer many-body stationary states with desired properties and the emergence of dissipative phase transitions arising out of the competition between coherent evolution and dissipation. We review the dynamics of open quantum many body systems in the presence of correlated many-body dissipative processes, such as heating and many-body losses. Finally we provide a different perspective on open quantum many-body systems by looking at stochastic quantum trajectories, relevant for the case in which the environment represents a monitoring device, and the associated measurement-induced phase transitions.

Quantum many-body scars (QMBS) are exceptional energy eigenstates of quantum many-body systems associated with violations of thermalization for special nonequilibrium initial states. Their various systematic constructions require fine-tuning of local Hamiltonian parameters. In this work, we demonstrate that long-range interacting quantum spin systems generically host robust QMBS. We analyze spectral properties upon raising the power-law decay exponent α of spin-spin interactions from the solvable permutationally symmetric limit α=0. First, we numerically establish that, despite the fact that spectral signatures of chaos appear for infinitesimal α, the towers of α=0 energy eigenstates with large collective spin are smoothly deformed as α is increased and exhibit characteristic QMBS features. To elucidate the nature and fate of these states in larger systems, we introduce an analytical approach based on mapping the spin Hamiltonian onto a relativistic quantum rotor nonlinearly coupled to an extensive set of bosonic modes. We analytically solve for the eigenstates of this interacting impurity model by means of a novel polaron-type canonical transformation and show their self-consistent localization in large-spin sectors of the original Hamiltonian for 0<α

Physical Review X 15, 011020, (January 2025)