Sufficient Condition for Gapless Spin-Boson Lindbladians, and Its Connection to Dissipative Time Crystals.

We discuss a sufficient condition for gapless excitations in the Lindbladian master equation for collective spin-boson systems and permutationally invariant systems. The condition relates a nonzero macroscopic cumulant correlation in the steady state to the presence of gapless modes in the Lindbladian. In phases arising from competing coherent and dissipative Lindbladian terms, we argue that such gapless modes, concomitant with angular momentum conservation, can lead to persistent dynamics in the spin observables with the possible formation of dissipative time crystals. We study different models within this perspective, from Lindbladians with Hermitian jump operators, to non-Hermitian ones composed by collective spins and Floquet spin-boson systems. We also provide a simple analytical proof for the exactness of the mean-field semiclassical approach in such systems based on a cumulant expansion.

Collective effects on the performance and stability of quantum heat engines.

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.

Quantum Statistical Complexity Measure as a Signaling of Correlation Transitions.

We introduce a quantum version for the statistical complexity measure, in the context of quantum information theory, and use it as a signaling function of quantum order-disorder transitions. We discuss the possibility for such transitions to characterize interesting physical phenomena, as quantum phase transitions, or abrupt variations in correlation distributions. We apply our measure on two exactly solvable Hamiltonian models: the 1D-Quantum Ising Model (in the single-particle reduced state), and on Heisenberg XXZ spin-1/2 chain (in the two-particle reduced state). We analyze its behavior across quantum phase transitions for finite system sizes, as well as in the thermodynamic limit by using Bethe Ansatz technique.

A possible route towards dissipation-protected qubits using a multidimensional dark space and its symmetries.

Quantum systems are always subject to interactions with an environment, typically resulting in decoherence and distortion of quantum correlations. It has been recently shown that a controlled interaction with the environment may actually help to create a state, dubbed as "dark", which is immune to decoherence. To encode quantum information in the dark states, they need to span a space with a dimensionality larger than one, so different orthogonal states act as a computational basis. Here, we devise a symmetry-based conceptual framework to engineer such degenerate dark spaces (DDS), protected from decoherence by the environment. We illustrate this construction with a model protocol, inspired by the fractional quantum Hall effect, where the DDS basis is isomorphic to a set of degenerate Laughlin states. The long-time steady state of our driven-dissipative model exhibits thus all the characteristics of degenerate vacua of a unitary topological system.

From localization to anomalous diffusion in the dynamics of coupled kicked rotors.

We study the effect of many-body quantum interference on the dynamics of coupled periodically kicked systems whose classical dynamics is chaotic and shows an unbounded energy increase. We specifically focus on an N-coupled kicked rotors model: We find that the interplay of quantumness and interactions dramatically modifies the system dynamics, inducing a transition between energy saturation and unbounded energy increase. We discuss this phenomenon both numerically and analytically through a mapping onto an N-dimensional Anderson model. The thermodynamic limit N→∞, in particular, always shows unbounded energy growth. This dynamical delocalization is genuinely quantum and very different from the classical one: Using a mean-field approximation, we see that the system self-organizes so that the energy per site increases in time as a power law with exponent smaller than 1. This wealth of phenomena is a genuine effect of quantum interference: The classical system for N≥2 always behaves ergodically with an energy per site linearly increasing in time. Our results show that quantum mechanics can deeply alter the regularity or ergodicity properties of a many-body-driven system.

Topological Phases of Parafermions: A Model with Exactly Solvable Ground States.

Parafermions are emergent excitations that generalize Majorana fermions and can also realize topological order. In this Letter, we present a nontrivial and quasi-exactly-solvable model for a chain of parafermions in a topological phase. We compute and characterize the ground-state wave functions, which are matrix-product states and have a particularly elegant interpretation in terms of Fock parafermions, reflecting the factorized nature of the ground states. Using these wave functions, we demonstrate analytically several signatures of topological order. Our study provides a starting point for the nonapproximate study of topological one-dimensional parafermionic chains with spatial inversion and time-reversal symmetry in the absence of strong edge modes.

Localized Majorana-Like Modes in a Number-Conserving Setting: An Exactly Solvable Model.

In this Letter we present, in a number conserving framework, a model of interacting fermions in a two-wire geometry supporting nonlocal zero-energy Majorana-like edge excitations. The model has an exactly solvable line, on varying the density of fermions, described by a topologically nontrivial ground state wave function. Away from the exactly solvable line we study the system by means of the numerical density matrix renormalization group. We characterize its topological properties through the explicit calculation of a degenerate entanglement spectrum and of the braiding operators which are exponentially localized at the edges. Furthermore, we establish the presence of a gap in its single particle spectrum while the Hamiltonian is gapless, and compute the correlations between the edge modes as well as the superfluid correlations. The topological phase covers a sizable portion of the phase diagram, the solvable line being one of its boundaries.