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arXiv:2605.05604 · Physical Review Research

Temporal Coarse-Graining as the Origin of Macroscopic Friction in Quantum Spin Chains via Data-Driven Liouvillian Extraction

Seiki Saito

quant-phcond-mat.stat-mechSubmitted May 7, 2026• Announced May 8, 2026• 0 citations• Revised Jul 27, 2026 (v2)
v1 · May 7, 2026v2 · Jul 27, 2026
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Abstract

Understanding how macroscopic irreversible hydrodynamics emerges from the reversible unitary dynamics of isolated quantum many-body systems remains a central challenge. Conventional approaches force spin density dynamics into purely diffusive models, obscuring the interplay of pressure, spin current, and local friction, and leave open the role of the observer's temporal resolution. We introduce a fully data-driven framework based on generalized Extended Dynamic Mode Decomposition (gEDMD) integrated with the Mori-Zwanzig projection. By expanding the observable dictionary to include spin currents, we extract the Navier-Stokes hydrodynamic coefficients from a chaotic XXZ spin chain across temporal coarse-graining scales. Our unconstrained extraction reveals a dichotomy: the mechanical elasticity ($c^2$) derives from the exact unitary dynamics, preserving microscopic reversibility, whereas the macroscopic friction ($γ$) and kinematic viscosity ($ν$) show zero net dissipation, oscillating rapidly around zero in the exact-derivative limit. Genuine macroscopic transport therefore requires finite temporal coarse-graining: at a finite observation timescale ($Δt_{cg} > 0$) the system passes through a crossover where these fluctuations average out, establishing an intermediate functional regime with strictly positive friction and viscosity. We further show that the coarse-grained generator is a predictive reduced model requiring only $O(N)$ macroscopic observables, and that the sign of the emergent friction is inherited from the causal, forward-in-time direction of the inference: time-symmetric estimators yield zero net dissipation at any coarse-graining scale. Macroscopic friction in isolated quantum systems is thus not an absolute property but an emergent phenomenon dictated by the temporal resolution and causal direction of the observer's description.

Journal reference
Phys. Rev. Research 8, 033348, 22 September, 2026
DOI
10.1103/41m6-x2m9

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Understanding how macroscopic irreversible hydrodynamics emerges from the reversible unitary dynamics of isolated quantum many-body systems remains a central challenge. Conventional approaches force spin density dynamics into purely diffusive models, obscuring the interplay of pressure, spin current, and local friction, and leave open the role of the observer's temporal resolution. We introduce a fully data-driven framework based on generalized Extended Dynamic Mode Decomposition (gEDMD) integrated with the Mori-Zwanzig projection. By expanding the observable dictionary to include spin currents, we extract the Navier-Stokes hydrodynamic coefficients from a chaotic XXZ spin chain across temporal coarse-graining scales. Our unconstrained extraction reveals a dichotomy: the mechanical elasticity (c2c^2c2) derives from the exact unitary dynamics, preserving microscopic reversibility, whereas the macroscopic friction (γγγ) and kinematic viscosity (ννν) show zero net dissipation, oscillating rapidly around zero in the exact-derivative limit. Genuine macroscopic transport therefore requires finite temporal coarse-graining: at a finite observation timescale (Δtcg>0Δt_{cg} > 0Δtcg​>0) the system passes through a crossover where these fluctuations average out, establishing an intermediate functional regime with strictly positive friction and viscosity. We further show that the coarse-grained generator is a predictive reduced model requiring only O(N)O(N)O(N) macroscopic observables, and that the sign of the emergent friction is inherited from the causal, forward-in-time direction of the inference: time-symmetric estimators yield zero net dissipation at any coarse-graining scale. Macroscopic friction in isolated quantum systems is thus not an absolute property but an emergent phenomenon dictated by the temporal resolution and causal direction of the observer's description.
Understanding how classical physics emerges from quantum mechanics remains a central problem in the foundations of physics. Here we derive a classical limit from finite-resolution measurements, modeled by continuous coarse-grained POVMs. When the resolved phase-space area is large compared with Planck's constant, the accessible statistics of any quantum state admit an effective classical description: coarse-grained observables become approximately jointly measurable and the induced probability density is positive. We derive the exact evolution equation for this density and show that, in the strong coarse-graining regime, its non-Liouville corrections are suppressed up to an Ehrenfest time, resulting in classical Hamiltonian flow generated by a Hamiltonian smoothed over the measurement cell. When the Hamiltonian varies negligibly across such a cell, the smoothed Hamiltonian reduces to the classical Hamiltonian whose quantization produced the quantum dynamics, thereby closing the quantization--classical-limit loop. Repeated finite-resolution measurements then generate stochastic records confined, with high probability, to tubes around classical trajectories. Our results provide a unified operational framework for the quantum-to-classical transition in microscopic and macroscopic systems, and establish the consistency of the quantization--classical-limit cycle.
A universal characterization of non-equilibrium steady states in interacting quantum many-body systems remains one of the central challenges of statistical physics. Here, we address this problem for a paradigmatic model of diffusive interacting quantum matter---the boundary-driven XXZ spin chain with bulk dephasing---and derive, directly from its microscopic Lindblad dynamics, an emergent classical Macroscopic Fluctuation Theory (MFT) governing its large-scale fluctuations. Crucially, the resulting hydrodynamics carries a density-dependent diffusivity and mobility as the fingerprint of interactions. This effective description enables the exact computation of the stationary density profile, long-range correlations, and the full counting statistics of the current, in excellent agreement with tensor-network simulations. Our work demonstrates that noisy quantum many-body systems can realize the universality class of genuinely interacting diffusive matter, beyond the constant-diffusivity class of the symmetric simple exclusion process, and establishes MFT as a powerful universal framework for interacting diffusive quantum systems.
We develop an interacting extension of the Double Covariance Model (DCM), a stochastic subquantum framework in which macroscopic quantum dynamics emerge through coarse-graining of correlated microscopic fluctuations. Starting from local stochastic differential equations on subsystem Hilbert spaces, we derive a closed evolution equation for a coarse-grained double covariance operator using multi-scale Itô calculus and sliding-window averaging. The construction explicitly incorporates two separated temporal scales: a fast microscopic fluctuation scale governing subquantum stochastic processes and a slower macroscopic observation scale associated with coarse-grained dynamics. Within the hydrodynamic limit, where the ratio between microscopic correlation time and averaging-window scale vanishes, rapidly fluctuating corrections disappear and the effective dynamics converges to a deterministic macroscopic transport equation. We show that the emergent macroscopic dynamics has the exact Gorini-Kossakowski-Sudarshan-Lindblad (GKSL) form: coherent Hamiltonian evolution arises from deterministic subquantum flow, while dissipative channels emerge from quadratic noise correlations. The framework further demonstrates how non-separable interaction Hamiltonians can arise from strictly local, state-dependent stochastic feedback fields. In the fluctuation-free limit, the model reduces naturally to the standard von Neumann equation, providing a unified stochastic foundation for both open and closed quantum dynamics.
Real-world experiments on quantum systems are always performed with measurement apparatus whose interaction times with the systems are finite. This restricts the observable quantum states to the space of time-coarse-grained density matrices ${\overline{\ensuremath{\rho}}(t)}$, providing motivation for the time-coarse-graining (TCG) approach that solves for $\overline{\ensuremath{\rho}}(t)$ without ever referring to the unobservable $\ensuremath{\rho}(t)$ of infinite time resolution. Phenomenologically, this implies that coherent transitions far outside the bandwidth would be filtered out, leaving only their effective impacts on the ``slow'' dynamics resolvable by the finite time resolution of the measurements. Therefore, the TCG framework provides rigorous justification for many existing effective Hamiltonian methods in the literature that aim at capturing the unitary part of the long-time dynamics. However, since time-coarse-graining is fundamentally irreversible, the resulting effective model allows for secular loss of information and dissipation of energy in general, which cannot be captured by any unitary effective models and has to be treated with explicit time-coarse-graining. Such incoherent effects are particularly prominent in driven nonlinear quantum systems where exchange of information and energy with the drive gives rise to incoherent effective dynamics at all finite time resolutions in general. While rigorous in principle, existing TCG methods in the literature can be applied only to simple systems by one iteratively solving superoperator equations at low orders in the coupling strengths. The complexity of such methods prevents systematic study of the time-coarse-grained dynamics and limits analytical results to the IR (low-resolution) limit in most cases. We address these limitations in this paper, presenting a systematic time-coarse-graining method that overcomes the complexities and restrictions of current techniques, offering a comprehensive and accurate modeling framework for driven nonlinear quantum systems. We derive closed-form formulas as well as diagrammatic representations for both unitary and nonunitary contributions, in the form of an effective Hamiltonian and nonunitary dissipators at arbitrary order in the coupling strengths, and complement this with a computer-algebra software package. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the method using several typical models of driven nonlinear systems in superconducting circuits, and show that it generalizes and improves on existing methods by providing more accurate results and explaining phenomena that have not been accounted for.
Abstract The emergence of diffusion is one of the deepest physical phenomena observed in many-body interacting, chaotic systems. But establishing rigorously that correlation functions, say of the spin, expand diffusively, remains one of the most important problems of mathematical physics. We establish for the first time, with Lindbladian evolution, a lower bound on spin diffusion in chaotic, translation-invariant, nearest-neighbor open quantum spin-1/2 chain satisfying a local unitality condition and strong conservation of magnetization. The bound is strictly positive if and only if the local quantum jumps transport spin. Physically, the bound comes from the spreading effects of initial-state macroscopic fluctuations, a mechanism which occurs whenever spin is an interacting ballistic mode. Chaoticity means that the Hilbert space of extensive charges is spanned by magnetization; we expect this to be generic. Our main tool is the Green-Kubo formula, the mathematical technique of projection over quadratically extensive charges, and appropriate correlation decay bounds recently established. Because Lindbladian dynamics is not reversible, the Green-Kubo spin diffusion strength includes a contribution due to irreversibility, which we interpret as encoding the hydrodynamic entropy production that may occur in the forgotten environment. This, we show, vanishes for certain choices of interaction parameters, for which the Lindbladian dynamics becomes reversible. Our methods can be extended to finite or short ranges, higher spins, and other non-Hamiltonian systems such as quantum circuits. As we argue, according to the theory of nonlinear fluctuating hydrodynamics, we further expect these systems to display superdiffusion, and thus have infinite diffusivity; however this appears to still be beyond the reach of mathematical rigor.
This Ph.D. thesis reports on progress in rigorously establishing hydrodynamic principles from the microscopic Hamiltonian dynamics of quantum many-body systems in a general, non-model-specific manner. Using the C*-algebra framework of statistical mechanics, we treat systems directly in the thermodynamic limit, primarily focusing on quantum lattice models where tools such as Lieb-Robinson bounds yield rigorous statements. We thus provide a proof-of-principle that large-scale behaviours can indeed be seen as emerging from microscopic dynamics, with mathematical proof. We first report on ergodicity results in short-range models with exponentially decaying or finite-range interactions. We show that time-averaged observables converge to their ensemble averages and decorrelate from all other observables almost everywhere within the light-cone defined by Lieb-Robinson bounds. This relaxation property indicates the loss of information at large scales, from which we prove a Boltzmann-Gibbs principle: at the Euler scaling limit of large time and distance, observables project onto hydrodynamic modes (extensive conserved quantities), within correlation functions. These results hold independently of microscopic details, capturing the physical idea that such details are lost at large space-time scales. Regarding finer scales of hydrodynamics, we discuss rigorous lower bounds on the strength of diffusion. We establish a general result on the clustering of n-th order connected correlations within C* dynamical systems. These results are applied to obtain a strictly positive lower bound on the diffusion constant of chaotic open quantum spin chains with nearest-neighbor interactions. This thesis underlines the universality of hydrodynamic principles, provides a framework for establishing them rigorously, and sets the stage for future progress toward the goal of proving the hydrodynamic equations.