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arXiv:2503.13731 · Nature Communications

Macroscopic particle transport in dissipative long-range bosonic systems

Hongchao Li, Cheng Shang, Tomotaka Kuwahara, Tan Van Vu

Published Mar 21, 2026• 3 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

Abstract The inevitable loss of particles in quantum many-body systems provides a more general and experimentally realistic perspective on particle transport. In this work, we determine the maximal speed of macroscopic particle transport in dissipative bosonic systems featuring both long-range hopping and long-range interactions. By developing a generalized optimal transport theory for open quantum systems, we rigorously establish the relationship between the minimum transport time and the source-target distance, and investigate the maximal transportable distance of bosons. We demonstrate that optimal transport exhibits a fundamental distinction depending on whether the system experiences one-body loss or multi-body loss. Moreover, we present the minimal transport time and the maximal transport distance for systems with both gain and loss. We observe that even an arbitrarily small gain rate enables transport over long distances if the lattice gas is dilute. Importantly, we generally reveal that the emergence of decoherence-free subspaces facilitates the long-distance and perfect transport process. Additionally, we derive an upper bound for the probability of transporting a given number of particles during a fixed period with one-body loss. Possible experimental protocols for observing our theoretical predictions are also discussed.

DOI
10.1038/s41467-026-70881-7

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Abstract The inevitable loss of particles in quantum many-body systems provides a more general and experimentally realistic perspective on particle transport. In this work, we determine the maximal speed of macroscopic particle transport in dissipative bosonic systems featuring both long-range hopping and long-range interactions. By developing a generalized optimal transport theory for open quantum systems, we rigorously establish the relationship between the minimum transport time and the source-target distance, and investigate the maximal transportable distance of bosons. We demonstrate that optimal transport exhibits a fundamental distinction depending on whether the system experiences one-body loss or multi-body loss. Moreover, we present the minimal transport time and the maximal transport distance for systems with both gain and loss. We observe that even an arbitrarily small gain rate enables transport over long distances if the lattice gas is dilute. Importantly, we generally reveal that the emergence of decoherence-free subspaces facilitates the long-distance and perfect transport process. Additionally, we derive an upper bound for the probability of transporting a given number of particles during a fixed period with one-body loss. Possible experimental protocols for observing our theoretical predictions are also discussed.
Understanding the ultimate rate at which information propagates is a pivotal issue in nonequilibrium physics. Nevertheless, the task of elucidating the propagation speed inherent in quantum bosonic systems presents challenges due to the unbounded nature of their interactions. In this study, we tackle the problem of macroscopic particle transport in a long-range generalization of the lattice Bose-Hubbard model through the lens of the quantum speed limit. By developing a unified approach based on optimal transport theory, we rigorously prove that the minimum time required for macroscopic particle transport is always bounded by the distance between the source and target regions, while retaining its significance even in the thermodynamic limit. Furthermore, we derive an upper bound for the probability of observing a specific number of bosons inside the target region, thereby providing additional insights into the dynamics of particle transport. Our results hold true for arbitrary initial states under both long-range hopping and long-range interactions, thus resolving an open problem of particle transport in generic bosonic systems.
The Lieb-Robinson bound asserts the existence of a maximal propagation speed for the quantum dynamics of lattice spin systems. Such general bounds are not available for most bosonic lattice gases due to their unbounded local interactions. Here we establish for the first time a general ballistic upper bound on macroscopic particle transport in the paradigmatic Bose-Hubbard model. The bound is the first to cover a broad class of initial states with positive density including Mott states, which resolves a longstanding open problem. It applies to Bose-Hubbard-type models on any lattice with not too long-ranged hopping. The proof is rigorous and rests on controlling the time evolution of a new kind of adiabatic spacetime localization observable via iterative differential inequalities.
Speed of state transitions in macroscopic systems is a crucial concept for foundations of nonequilibrium statistical mechanics as well as various applications in quantum technology represented by optimal quantum control.While extensive studies have made efforts to obtain rigorous constraints on dynamical processes since Mandelstam and Tamm, speed limits that provide tight bounds for macroscopic transitions have remained elusive.Here, by employing the local conservation law of probability, the fundamental principle in physics, we develop a general framework for deriving qualitatively tighter speed limits for macroscopic systems than many conventional ones.We show for the first time that the speed of the expectation value of an observable defined on an arbitrary graph, which can describe general many-body systems, is bounded by the "gradient" of the observable, in contrast with conventional speed limits depending on the entire range of the observable.This framework enables us to derive novel quantum speed limits for macroscopic unitary dynamics.Unlike previous bounds, the speed limit decreases when the expectation value of the transition Hamiltonian increases; this intuitively describes a new trade-off relation between time and the quantum phase difference.Our bound is dependent on instantaneous quantum states and thus can achieve the equality condition, which is conceptually distinct from the Lieb-Robinson bound.We also find that, beyond expectation values of macroscopic observables, the speed of macroscopic quantum coherence can be bounded from above by our general approach.The newly obtained bounds are verified in transport phenomena in particle systems and nonequilibrium dynamics in many-body spin systems.We also demonstrate that our strategy can be applied for finding new speed limits for macroscopic transitions in stochastic systems, including quantum ones, where the bounds are expressed by the entropy production rate.Our work elucidates novel speed limits on the basis of local conservation law, providing fundamental limits to various types of nonequilibrium quantum macroscopic phenomena.
In this thesis we present our results on the propagation of correlations in long-range interacting quantum systems. The dynamics of local observables in these systems cannot be described with the standard methods used in equilibrium statistical physics and completely new methods have to be developed. Several bounds on the time evolution of correlations have been derived for these systems. However the propagation found in experimental and numerical results is completely different and several regimes are present depending on the long-range character of the interactions. Here we present analytical expressions to describe the time evolution of generic observables in systems where the Hamiltonian takes a quadratic form with long- and short-range interactions. These expressions describe the spreading of local observables as the spreading of the fundamental excitations of the system. We apply these expressions to a spin model finding three different propagation regimes. They can be described qualitatively et quantitatively by the divergences in the energy spectrum. The most important result is that the propagation is at most ballistic, but it can be also significantly slower, where the general bounds predict a propagation faster than ballistic. This points out that the bounds are not able to describe properly the propagation, but a more specific approach is needed. We then move to a system of lattice bosons interacting via long-range interactions. In this case we study two different observables finding completely different results for the same interactions: the spreading of two-body correlations is always ballistic while the one of the one-body correlations ranges from faster-than-ballistic to ballistic. Using our general analytic expressions we find that different parts of the spectrum contribute differently to different observables determining the previous differences. This points out that an observable-dependent notion of locality, missing in the general bounds, have to be developed to correctly describe the time evolution.
The speed of information propagation in long-range interacting quantum systems is limited by Lieb-Robinson-type bounds, whose tightness can be established by finding specific quantum state-transfer protocols. Previous works have given quantum state-transfer protocols that saturate the corresponding Lieb-Robinson bounds using time-dependent Hamiltonians. Are speed limits for quantum information propagation different for time-independent Hamiltonians? In a step towards addressing this question, we present and analyze two optimal time-independent state-transfer protocols for free-particle systems, which utilize continuous-time single-particle quantum walks with hopping strength decaying as a power law. We rigorously prove and numerically confirm that our protocols achieve quantum state transfer, with controllable error over an arbitrarily long distance in any spatial dimension, at the speed limits set by the free-particle Lieb-Robinson bounds. This shows that time independence does not limit information flow for long-range free-particle Hamiltonians.
We study transport and relaxation of spinless fermions with long-range Coulomb interactions at high temperatures through numerical simulations of out-of-equilibrium dynamics. We find that the transport and relaxation are continuously slowing down for increasing coupling VVV, and that there is a transition in the type of transport. For intermediate couplings, the system exhibits normal diffusive transport, but the timescale for the onset of that is long. For large couplings, it exhibits subdiffusive transport, while at the same time, the relaxation time diverges exponentially with system lengths, featuring a many-body-localization (MBL)-like phase. We attribute the slow transport to formation of slow bound states and stable clusters of particles. For few-particle systems, we prove the existence, visualize the slowness, and analyze the collision properties of the bound states. For many particles at high densities, there should be a hierarchy of clusters of particles on many different length scales. We argue that at large couplings, the average maximal size of the stable clusters should scale linearly with the length of the lattice, which is in accordance with the MBL-like behavior.