Data-Driven Discovery of Dynamical Signatures of Quantum Phase Transitions via Symbolic Regression
igor merlini
Abstract
We present a data-driven framework for discovering dynamical signatures of quantum phase transitions directly from simulated observables. By combining sparse identification of nonlinear dynamics (SINDy), symbolic regression (PySR), and spectral analysis, we extract interpretable features from time series generated by QuTiP simulations of the transverse-field Ising chain. We demonstrate that the dominant oscillation frequency ω of the mean magnetization M(t) scales with system size as ω ~ N^z, with the exponent z taking distinct values in the three phases: z ≈ -1.35 (ferromagnetic), z ≈ -0.91 (critical), z ≈ -0.35 (paramagnetic). At the quantum critical point J = h, the exponent z ≈ -1 is consistent with the known finite-size scaling of the energy gap Δ ~ N⁻¹ in the transverse-field Ising chain, establishing a direct connection between the dynamical frequency and the spectral gap. The frequency signal is robust to measurement noise up to 5% and stable with simulation time, making it a reliable probe of phase structure accessible without prior knowledge of the order parameter or the Hamiltonian. Our results suggest that spectral analysis combined with symbolic regression can serve as an automated discovery tool for identifying dynamical phase structure in quantum many-body systems.