On a question of André Verbeure

O. Costa de Beauregard

Wojciech De Roeck, Christian Maes

Dedicated to André Verbeure on the occasion of his 65th birthday. Abstract: Before the thermodynamic limit, macroscopic averages need not commute for a quantum system. As a consequence, aspects of macroscopic fluctuations or of constrained equilibrium require a careful analysis, when dealing with several observables. We propose an implementation of ideas that go back to John von Neumann’s writing about the macroscopic measurement. We apply our scheme to the relation between macroscopic autonomy and an H−theorem, and to the problem of equivalence of ensembles. In particular, we prove a quantum version of the asymptotic equipartition theorem. The main point of departure is an expression of a law of large numbers for a sequence of states that start to concentrate, as the size of the system gets larger, on the macroscopic values for the different macroscopic observables. Deviations from that law are governed by the entropy.

Lucién Hardy

Javad Vahedi, Stefan Kettemann

Advances in experimental tools allow to study quantum fidelity in unprecedented controlled settings. While the fidelity in metals, when adding a local impurity, is well known to show the Anderson orthogonality catastrophe (AOC), there remain outstanding questions in other quantum phases and settings. Here, we aim to tackle these by exploring systematically the ground-state fidelity of the Fermi liquid in the (extended) Aubry-Andr\'e (AA) model, which allows to explore the AOC in both localized extended and critical phases. We discover that the AOC is typically exponential in the critical regime of the AA model and at the mobility edge of the extended AA model for an extended impurity, while it decays in the AA model with a power law for a weak single-site impurity. We explain this in terms of critical correlations and multipoint correlations. The OC is found to be exponential in the insulating regime, due to a fundamentally different, statistical mechanism, which is explained in detail. Furthermore, we consider a parametric perturbation to the AA model, and find an exponential OC numerically, in agreement with an analytical derivation which we provide here.

Manfred Requardt

We employ the machinery of smooth scaling and coarse-graining of observables, developed recently by us in the context of so-called fluctuation operators (inspired by prior work of Verbeure et al) to make a rigorous renormalisation group analysis of the critical regime. The approach appears to be quite general, encompassing classical, quantum, discrete and continuous systems. One of our central topics is the analysis of the famous `scaling hypothesis', that is, we make a general investigation under what conditions on the l-point correlation functions a scale invariant (non-trivial) limit theory can be actually attained. Furthermore, we study in a rigorous manner questions like the quantum character of the system in the scaling limit, the phenomenon of critical slowing down etc.