Noise-driven noninteracting fermions have an interacting effective action. This makes it exceedingly difficult to compute their noise-averaged density matrix. Nevertheless, here we show that the exact time dependence of noise-averaged quadratic observables (such as energy and the fermionic Green's function) can be obtained from a Heisenberg-picture approach. Our results provide access to a long-time limit, which is not amenable to numerical simulations. As a simple example, we examine the fate of fractional charge in a noisy dimerized lattice (relevant to cold-atom emulations of polyacetylene). We find that the fractional charge remains robust against noisy nearest-neighbor hopping processes, while it becomes unstable to fluctuations in the second-neighbor hopping.
Noise-driven noninteracting fermions have an interacting effective action. This makes it exceedingly difficult to compute their noise-averaged density matrix. Nevertheless, here we show that the exact time dependence of noise-averaged quadratic observables (such as energy and the fermionic Green's function) can be obtained from a Heisenberg-picture approach. Our results provide access to a long-time limit, which is not amenable to numerical simulations. As a simple example, we examine the fate of fractional charge in a noisy dimerized lattice (relevant to cold-atom emulations of polyacetylene). We find that the fractional charge remains robust against noisy nearest-neighbor hopping processes, while it becomes unstable to fluctuations in the second-neighbor hopping.
Based on the Heisenberg-picture analog of the master equation, we develop a method for computing the exact time dependence of noise-averaged observables for general noninteracting fermionic systems with noisy fluctuations. Upon noise averaging, these fluctuations generate effective interactions, limiting analytical approaches. While the short-time dynamics can be studied with Langevin-type numerical simulations, the long-time limit is not amenable to such simulations. Our results provide access to this long-time limit. As a simple example, we examine the fate of the fractional charge in cold-atom emulations of polyacetylene after stochastic driving. We find that in a quantum quench to a fluctuating hopping Hamiltonian, the fractional charge remains robust for hopping between different sublattices, while it becomes unstable in the presence of noisy hopping on the same sublattice.
We study the fluctuation statistics of integrated currents in noisy quantum diffusive systems, focusing on the Quantum Symmetric Simple Exclusion and Inclusion Processes (QSSEP/QSSIP). These one-dimensional fermionic (QSSEP) and bosonic (QSSIP) models feature stochastic nearest-neighbor hopping driven by Brownian noise, together with boundary injection and removal processes. They provide solvable microscopic settings in which quantum coherence coexists with diffusion. Upon noise averaging, their dynamics reduce to those of the classical SSEP/SSIP. We show that the cumulant-generating function of the integrated current, at large scales, obeys a large deviation principle. To leading order in system size and for each noise realization, it converges to that of the corresponding classical process, establishing a classical typicality of current fluctuations in these noisy quantum systems. We further demonstrate a direct connection with Macroscopic Fluctuation Theory (MFT), showing that the large-scale equations satisfied by biased quantum densities coincide with the steady-state Hamilton equations of MFT, thereby providing a microscopic quantum justification of the MFT framework in these models. Finally, we identify the leading finite-size corrections to the current statistics. We show the existence of subleading contributions of purely quantum origin, which are absent in the corresponding classical setting, and provide their explicit expressions for the second and third current cumulants. These quantum corrections are amenable to direct experimental or numerical verification, provided sufficient control over the noise realizations can be achieved. Their presence points toward the necessity of a quantum extension of MFT.
Quantum simulations before fault tolerance suffer from the intrinsic noise present in quantum computers. In this regime, extracting meaningful results greatly benefits from stability against that noise. This stability, defined as an error in observables that is independent of the system's size, is expected in local systems under local noise. In fermionic systems, the encoding of the fermionic degrees of freedom into qubits can introduce non-locality, making stability more delicate. Here, we investigate the stability to noise of fermion-to-qubit mappings. We consider noisy quantum circuits in D dimensions modeled by alternating layers of local unitaries and general, single-qubit Pauli noise. We show that, when using local fermionic encodings, expectation values of quadratic fermionic observables are stable to noise in states with spatially decaying correlations: a power-law decay with exponent μ>D is sufficient for stability. By contrast, we show that this stability cannot be achieved by non-local encodings such as Jordan-Wigner in 2D, or quasi-local ones such as the Bravyi-Kitaev transform. Our findings formalize the intuition that decaying correlations of the physical systems under study provide protection against noise for local fermionic encodings, and help inform design principles in near-term quantum simulations.
Understanding how the dynamics of a given quantum system with many degrees of freedom is altered by the presence of a generic perturbation is a notoriously difficult question. Recent works predict that, in the overwhelming majority of cases, the unperturbed dynamics is just damped by a simple function, e.g., exponentially as expected from Fermi's golden rule. While these predictions rely on random-matrix arguments and typicality, they can only be verified for a specific physical situation by comparing to the actual solution or measurement. Crucially, it also remains unclear how frequent and under which conditions counterexamples to the typical behavior occur. In this work, we discuss this question from the perspective of projection-operator techniques, where exponential damping of a density matrix occurs in the interaction picture but not necessarily in the Schrödinger picture. We show that a nontrivial damping in the Schrödinger picture can emerge if the dynamics in the unperturbed system possesses rich features, for instance due to the presence of strong interactions. This suggestion has consequences for the time dependence of correlation functions. We substantiate our theoretical arguments by large-scale numerical simulations of charge transport in the extended Fermi-Hubbard chain, where the nearest-neighbor interactions are treated as a perturbation to the integrable reference system.
We investigate the quantum many-body instabilities of the extended Hubbard model for spinless fermions on the honeycomb lattice with repulsive nearest-neighbor and second-nearest-neighbor density-density interactions. Recent exact diagonalization and infinite density matrix renormalization group results suggest that a putative topological Mott insulator phase driven by the second-nearest-neighbor repulsion is suppressed, while other numerically exact approaches support the topological Mott insulator scenario. In the present work, we employ the functional renormalization group (fRG) for correlated fermionic systems. Our fRG results hint at a strong suppression of the scattering processes stabilizing the topological Mott insulator. From analyzing the effects of fermionic fluctuations, we obtain a phase diagram, which is the result of the competition of various charge ordering instabilities.
We address memory effects and diffusive properties of a continuous-time quantum walk on a one-dimensional percolation lattice affected by spatially correlated random telegraph noise. In particular, by introducing spatially correlated time-dependent fluctuations in nearest-neighbor hopping amplitudes, we describe random domains characterized by global noise. The resulting open dynamics of the walker is then unraveled by an ensemble average over all the noise realizations. Our results show that time-dependent noise assisted by spatial correlations leads to strong memory effects in the walker dynamics and to robust diffusive behavior against the detrimental action of uncorrelated noise. We also show that spatially correlated classical noise enhances localization breaking, thus making a quantum particle spread on longer distances across the lattice.