We study the broken-symmetry phase of the Lipkin-Meshkov-Glick (LMG) model, whose two lowest states form a near-degenerate parity doublet split by tunnelling. We show that the same instanton action S_inst that sets the doublet splitting also controls how much parity information a static J_z magnetisation readout can extract. Although J_z measures magnetisation rather than parity - and so distinguishes the two wells easily while remaining almost blind to their relative sign - WKB barrier arguments together with exact diagonalisation show that the spectral gap, the total-variation distance, and the nonlinear distinguishability measures (Jensen-Shannon divergence and Chernoff information) share a single instanton exponent, rather than the doubled exponent a naive small-deviation expansion in the lobes would suggest. Exact diagonalisation up to N = 4500 supports a common leading exponent for all four quantities, with fitted values within a few percent of the WKB instanton value in the largest reliable windows. The same coupling acts strongly inside the doublet: its off-diagonal element grows as |J_01| -> N m_*/2, so the bath can disturb the parity label far more strongly than it can read it from a frozen histogram. We call this separation the static parity horizon - a benchmark for the idealised static J_z channel, not a universal bound on time-resolved monitoring. Restoring the full monitored dynamics, continuous-monitoring simulations (1.48 million full-LMG trajectories with matched QND controls across 77 independent settings) show that a time-resolved homodyne record extracts parity information hidden from the single-shot histogram, over a finite window of system sizes organised by the ratio xi = omega_01/Gamma_01 of coherent doublet rotation to measurement-induced dephasing, and closing again under strong measurement.
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91 pages, 13 figures, 7 tables. Full reproduction package (exact-diagonalisation code for the static readout/backaction quantities, SME/Girsanov-classifier code for the dynamical bypass, cached .npz data, figure scripts, SHA-256 manifest, pinned environment) openly available on Zenodo, doi:10.5281/zenodo.20773086. Companion analyses: arXiv:2605.00952
We study the broken-symmetry phase of the Lipkin-Meshkov-Glick (LMG) model, whose two lowest states form a near-degenerate parity doublet split by tunnelling. We show that the same instanton action S_inst that sets the doublet splitting also controls how much parity information a static J_z magnetisation readout can extract. Although J_z measures magnetisation rather than parity - and so distinguishes the two wells easily while remaining almost blind to their relative sign - WKB barrier arguments together with exact diagonalisation show that the spectral gap, the total-variation distance, and the nonlinear distinguishability measures (Jensen-Shannon divergence and Chernoff information) share a single instanton exponent, rather than the doubled exponent a naive small-deviation expansion in the lobes would suggest. Exact diagonalisation up to N = 4500 supports a common leading exponent for all four quantities, with fitted values within a few percent of the WKB instanton value in the largest reliable windows. The same coupling acts strongly inside the doublet: its off-diagonal element grows as |J_01| -> N m_*/2, so the bath can disturb the parity label far more strongly than it can read it from a frozen histogram. We call this separation the static parity horizon - a benchmark for the idealised static J_z channel, not a universal bound on time-resolved monitoring. Restoring the full monitored dynamics, continuous-monitoring simulations (1.48 million full-LMG trajectories with matched QND controls across 77 independent settings) show that a time-resolved homodyne record extracts parity information hidden from the single-shot histogram, over a finite window of system sizes organised by the ratio xi = omega_01/Gamma_01 of coherent doublet rotation to measurement-induced dephasing, and closing again under strong measurement.
The Lipkin-Meshkov-Glick (LMG) model originally describes a Fermionic many-body system in nuclear physics. However, in recent years, it has been widely found in condensed matter physics, quantum information systems, and quantum optics, and it is of wider and wider interest. Previous studies on this model mainly focused on the physics under the thermal dynamical limit, such as quantum phase transitions and quantum entanglement. There are also some researches about LMG model with finite size in some special limits, but the finite-size effect on energy spectrum is not very clear yet. This is the main motivation of this work. In this paper, the exact diagonalization method and the quantum perturbation theory are used to calculate and analyze the energy-level structure of the LMG model at a finite N. To solve it, we first map this model into the angular-momentum space to obtain a reduced LMG model. By this mapping, the dimension of Hilbert space is reduced to N+1 from 2N. The exact solution of its energy levels can be obtained easily in the U(1) limit where the total spin is conserved. We find that the levels are woven into a fishing-net structure in the U(1) limit. While away from the U(1) limit, the crossings between even and odd levels will open a gap, and the system's energy levels will be grouped into pairs with an odd and an even level, forming some bound states, called doublet states, and the parity of each doublet state will oscillate as the Zeeman field increases. This work gives the values of the critical Zeeman field for the parity crossings. These critical values shift as the interacting parameters and disappear at zero in the Z2 limit. In the Z2 limit, the system energy levels form splittings near the zero Zeeman field. In this article, we analytically calculate the relationship between these energy gaps and the Zeeman field. For odd and even number N, the parity of each state has a different behavior. Specifically, the ground state and the doublet excited states of the system with odd N will suffer a parity reversion at zero Zeeman field, while the states with even N will not. By tuning the interacting parameters, we also study the crossover from the U(1) limit to the Z2 limit. The parity oscillation we find in this system is a very important physical phenomenon, which also exists in some other systems like optical cavity quantum electrodynamics and magnetic molecule system.
We derive strict quantitative conditions under which a collective quantum system of N~370 spins exhibits classically forbidden temporal correlations in a spinor Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC). The Lipkin-Meshkov-Glick (LMG) model near its Z_2-breaking quantum critical point supports a mesoscopic superposition a|P> + b|R> of two macroscopic ordered phases (|P>: m_z ~ +m_*; |R>: m_z ~ -m_*) at the Goldilocks crossover N ~ N_c, where the tunnel splitting equals k_B T and macroscopic susceptibility chi ~ N coexists with finite quantum coherence. We establish two quantum-discriminating predictions. P4 (Landau-Zener crossover, proposed discriminator): quantum tunnelling drives P_error -> 0 exponentially with quench time, while the classically non-ergodic system remains kinetically frozen at P_error -> 1 - a parametrically large, computable separation that rests on a specific kinetic foil. P5 (Leggett--Garg inequality violation, strictly model-independent): K_3 > 1 is forbidden by macrorealism for all classical models satisfying non-invasive measurability. A five-level Lindblad simulation yields K_3 ~ 1.32 and dephasing threshold gamma_phi < 0.289 s^{-1} at the BEC target (gamma_phi = 0.05 s^{-1}, N = 370, Gamma/J = 0.95) - a margin of 8.8x above the optimal measurement interval, well within current experimental reach. The threshold has a precise physical origin in the emergent collective Z_2 symmetry: exact parity eliminates the dominant dephasing cross-term and renders the LGI correlator immune to T_1 population mixing without requiring ground-state preparation (2.35x improvement over the naive mean-field estimate); constructive dynamical phase alignment of higher odd-parity states at the benchmark parameters contributes a further 2.47x. All results are reproducible from the provided self-tested Python code.
Degeneracy patterns in quantum mechanics stem from the system symmetries. In particular, the broken-symmetry phase in the well-known Lipkin-Meshkov-Glick (LMG) model is composed of doubly-degenerate states of different parity. In this work, we show that such doublets can exist even if parity is not conserved. For this purpose, our starting point is an anharmonic LMG Hamiltonian with a second-order ground-state quantum phase transition (GSQPT) and a rich spectrum, with two different excited-state quantum phase transitions. The inclusion in the Hamiltonian of a term inducing a first-order GSQPT breaks the parity symmetry but conserving the exponential degeneracy in the energy doublets. We demonstrate that this phenomenon can be traced back to the existence of a Z2 symmetry (reflection symmetry) in the system's classical limit phase space that leads to an anti-unitary Z2 symmetry in the quantum system.
In the ordered phase of a Z2-symmetric collective spin system, two natural bases -- localised pointer states {∣P⟩,∣R⟩} and energy eigenstates {∣E0⟩,∣E1⟩} -- yield Lindblad dephasing rates that differ by a factor approaching 2 as N→∞ and reaching 2.42 near the quantum-critical crossover. The discrepancy has a single algebraic origin: parity forces ⟨Ei∣J^z∣Ei⟩=0 exactly, eliminating the cross-term that doubles the localised-state rate. Two distinct protection factors are identified: ηMF=(Nm∗)2/(2G01)≈2.42, where m∗ is the order parameter and G01=21(⟨E0∣J^z2∣E0⟩+⟨E1∣J^z2∣E1⟩) (advantage over the classical mean-field estimate), and ηexact=(G01+J012)/G01≈1.86, where J01=⟨E0∣J^z∣E1⟩ (exact physical ratio of pointer-state to eigenstate decay rate). In the thermodynamic limit the secular approximation fails, the doublet degenerates, and both rates converge. The three-regime structure is demonstrated in the Lipkin-Meshkov-Glick model via exact diagonalisation, and the algebraic origin of the discrepancy is established via the Z2 parity of the Lindblad jump operator.
We study the dynamics of the Lipkin-Meshkov-Glick (LMG) model with a finite number of spins. In the thermodynamic limit, the ground state of the LMG model with an isotropic Hamiltonian in the broken phase breaks to a mean-field ground state with a certain direction. However, when the spin number N is finite, the exact ground state is always unique and is not given by a classical mean-field ground state. Here, we prove that when N is large but finite, through a tiny external perturbation, a localized state which is close to a mean-field ground state can be prepared, which mimics spontaneous symmetry breaking. Also, we find the localized in-plane spin polarization oscillates with two different frequencies $\ensuremath{\sim}O(1/N)$, and the lifetime of the localized state is long enough to exhibit this oscillation. We numerically test the analytical results and find that they agree very well with each other. Finally, we link the phenomena to quantum time crystals and time quasicrystals.
The entanglement between noncomplementary blocks of a many-body system, where a part of the system forms an ignored environment, is a largely untouched problem without analytic results. We rectify this gap by studying the logarithmic negativity between two macroscopic sets of spins in an arbitrary tripartition of a collection of mutually interacting spins described by the Lipkin-Meshkov-Glick Hamiltonian. This entanglement measure is found to be finite and universal at the critical point for any tripartition whereas it diverges for a bipartition. In this limiting case, we show that it behaves as the entanglement entropy, suggesting a deep relation between the scaling exponents of these two independently defined quantities which may be valid for other systems.