arXiv subjects

Atanu Rajak

Publications and source records attributed to Atanu Rajak.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Emergent Nonperturbative Universal Floquet Localization

We show that a robust, nonperturbative localization plateau emerges in periodically driven quasiperiodic lattices, independent of the static localization properties and drive protocol. Using exact Floquet dynamics, Floquet perturbation theory, and optimal-order van Vleck analysis, we identify a fine-tuned amplitude-to-frequency ratio where all Floquet states become localized despite dense resonances. The van Vleck expansion achieves superasymptotic accuracy up to an optimal orde; it ultimately breaks down due to resonant hybridization at a weak quasiperiodic potential, revealing that the observed localization is nonperturbative.

cond-mat.dis-nn↗

arXiv2025

Higher-order discrete time crystals and enhanced sensing in a quantum kicked top

We characterize various dynamical phases of the simplest version of the quantum kicked top model, a paradigmatic system for studying quantum chaos, which exhibits both regular and chaotic behavior depending on the kick strength. In a previous study, the existence of higher-order discrete time crystals (DTCs) was observed in an infinite-range interacting $p$-spin model, where it was proposed that the order of the DTC satisfies the relation $q\le p$. Within this framework, the $p=2$ model is expected to host only a $2$-DTC phase. However, interestingly, we demonstrate here the existence of a robust $4$-DTC phase in the quantum kicked top, which effectively corresponds to a $p=2$ model with infinite-range interactions. We also show that the system hosts robust $2$-DTC and dynamical freezing (DF) phases around alternating rotationally symmetric points. We explain the emergence of higher-order DTC phases through the classical phase portraits of the system, connected with spin coherent states (SCSs), by identifying special islands that arise within a specific parametric regime. Unlike the $2$-DTC phase, the $4$-DTC phase appears only for certain initial states, as demonstrated through exact calculations. The robustness of the $4$-DTC phase is further investigated through the dynamics of the linear entropy as a function of the angular momentum. We also find an emergent conservation law for both the $2$-DTC and DF phases, while no dynamical conservation arises periodically for the $4$-DTC phase. By investigating the quantum Fisher information, we also demonstrate enhanced metrological sensitivity at the boundaries between different dynamical phases for the estimation of system parameters.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2025

Global Blind Spot in Understanding Trigonometric Derivatives: A Multinational Analysis

Trigonometric derivatives are fundamental in both mathematics and physics, yet their proper application, particularly the distinction between radians and degrees, poses a significant challenge for college students globally. This study identifies a widespread "blind spot" in understanding trigonometric derivatives and their implications for physical systems, highlighting a critical gap in physics education. A multinational survey of 769 college students, primarily undergraduate and graduate STEM majors, from Israel, the United States, China, and India assessed their ability to differentiate between radians and degrees in mathematical and physical contexts, focusing on harmonic motion. Results reveal that only 26.3\% of students correctly identified that the well-known expressions for trigonometric derivatives hold exclusively in radians, while 70.7\% incorrectly assumed both radians and degrees are valid. Notably, students demonstrated improved recognition of radians in physical contexts (59.0\% correct responses) compared to mathematical ones, suggesting that students rely on familiar physical equations as cognitive reference points when applying mathematical concepts. These misunderstandings appear worldwide, suggesting a universal challenge. The findings highlight the need for curriculum reforms to better connect mathematical formalism with physical application.

physics.ed-ph↗

arXiv2024

Statistical prethermalization in randomly kicked many-body classical rotor system

We explore the phenomena of prethermalization in a many-body classical system of rotors under aperiodic drives characterised by waiting time distribution (WTD), where the waiting time is defined as the time between two consecutive kicks. We consider here two types of aperiodic drives: random and quasi-periodic. We observe a short-lived pseudo-thermal regime with algebraic suppression of heating for the random drive where WTD has an infinite tail, as observed for Poisson and binomial kick sequences. On the other hand, quasi-periodic drive characterised by a WTD with a sharp cut-off, observed for Thue-Morse sequence of kick, leads to prethermal region where heating is exponentially suppressed. The kinetic energy growth is analyzed using an average surprise associated with WTD quantifying the randomness of drive. In all of the aperiodic drives we obtain the chaotic heating regime for late time, however, the diffusion constant gets renormalized by the average surprise of WTD in comparison to the periodic case.

cond-mat.stat-mech↗

arXiv2023

Quantum Annealing in Sherrington-Kirkpatrick Spin Glass in Presence of Time-Dependent Longitudinal Field

Motivated by the recent development of quantum technology using quantum annealing technique and the recent works on the static properties of the Sherrington-Kirkpatrick (SK) spin glass model, we study quantum annealing of the spin glass model by tuning both transverse and longitudinal fields. We numerically solve the time-dependent Schr\"odinger equation of the total Hamiltonian when both the fields are made time-dependent and eventually vanish at the same time. We have computed the time-evolution of the probability of finding the system in one of two degenerate ground states of the classical spin glass. At the end of annealing, using the configuration averaged probability, we have shown a clear advantage while the longitudinal field is annealed rather than keeping it constant throughout the process of quantum annealing. We further investigate the order parameter distribution of a quantum SK spin glass in presence of a small longitudinal field and find, from our exact diaginalization results for small system sizes, evidence for quantum tunneling induced disappearance of the classical Almeida-Thouless phase boundary separating the replica symmetry broken (nonergodic) and replica symmetric (ergodic) spin glass phase (reported already in $2022$). We believe that this longitudinal field induced ergodicity in quantum SK model to be responsible for the observed enhancement of quantum annealing (reported earlier for smaller systems by us in $2014$).

cond-mat.stat-mech↗

arXiv2022

Quantum Annealing: An Overview

In this review, after providing the basic physical concept behind quantum annealing (or adiabatic quantum computation), we present an overview of some recent theoretical as well as experimental developments pointing to the issues which are still debated. With a brief discussion on the fundamental ideas of continuous and discontinuous quantum phase transitions, we discuss the Kibble-Zurek scaling of defect generation following a ramping of a quantum many body system across a quantum critical point. In the process, we discuss associated models, both pure and disordered, and shed light on implementations and some recent applications of the quantum annealing protocols. Furthermore, we discuss the effect of environmental coupling on quantum annealing. Some possible ways to speed up the annealing protocol in closed systems are elaborated upon: We especially focus on the recipes to avoid discontinuous quantum phase transitions occurring in some models where energy gaps vanish exponentially with the system size.

cond-mat.stat-mech↗

arXiv2022

Stochastic Learning in Kolkata Paise Restaurant Problem: Classical \& Quantum Strategies

We will review the results for stochastic learning strategies, both classical (one-shot and iterative) and quantum (one-shot only), for optimizing the available many-choice resources among a large number of competing agents, developed over the last decade in the context of the Kolkata Paise Restaurant Problem. Apart from a few rigorous and approximate analytical results, both for classical and quantum strategies, most of the interesting results on the phase transition behavior (obtained so far for the classical model) using classical Monte Carlo simulations. All these, including the applications to computer science (job or resource allotments in Internet-of-Things), transport engineering (on-line vehicle hire problems), operation research (optimizing efforts for delegated search problem, efficient solution of Travelling Salesman problem), etc will be discussed.

physics.soc-ph↗

arXiv2021

From prethermalization to chaos in periodically driven coupled rotors

Periodically driven (Floquet) systems are said to prethermalize when their energy absorption is very slow for long time. This effect was first discovered in quantum spin models, where the heating rate is exponentially small in the ratio between the driving frequency and the spin bandwidth. Recently, it was shown that prethermalization occurs also in classical systems with an infinite bandwidth. Here, we address the open question of which small parameter controls the lifetime of the prethermal state in these systems. We, first, numerically study the dependence of the lifetime on the initial conditions and on the connectivity in a system of periodically driven coupled rotors. We find that the lifetime is controlled by the temperature of the prethermal state, which is quasi-conserved when the heating is slow. This finding allows us to develop a simple analytical model that describes the crossover from prethermalization to chaos in many-body classical systems.

cond-mat.stat-mech↗

arXiv2021

Dynamics of fluctuation correlation in periodically driven classical system

Having established the fact that interacting classical kicked rotor systems exhibit long-lived prethermal phase with quasi-conserved average Hamiltonian before entering into chaotic heating regime, we use spatio-temporal fluctuation correlation of kinetic energy to probe the above dynamic phases. We remarkably find the diffusive transport of fluctuation in the prethermal regime reminding us the underlying hydrodynamic picture in a generalized Gibbs ensemble with a definite temperature that depends on the driving parameter and initial conditions. On the other hand, the heating regime, characterized by a diffusive growth of kinetic energy, can sharply localize the correlation at the fluctuation center for all time. Consequently, we attribute non-diffusive and non-localize structure of correlation to the crossover regime, connecting the prethermal phase to the heating phase, where the kinetic energy displays complicated growth structure. We understand these numerical findings using the notion of relative phase matching where prethermal phase (heating regime) refers to an effectively coupled (isolated) nature of the rotors. We exploit the statistical uncorrelated nature of the angles of the rotors in the heating regime to find the analytical form of the correlator that mimics our numerical results in a convincing way.

cond-mat.stat-mech↗

arXiv2020

Stability, Isolated Chaos, and Superdiffusion in Nonequilibrium Many-Body Interacting Systems

We demonstrate that stability and chaotic-transport features of paradigmatic nonequilibrium many-body systems, i.e., periodically kicked and interacting particles, can deviate significantly from the expected ones of full instability and normal chaotic diffusion for arbitrarily strong chaos, arbitrary number of particles, and different interaction cases. We rigorously show that under the latter general conditions there exist {\em fully stable} orbits, accelerator-mode (AM) fixed points, performing ballistic motion in momentum. It is numerically shown that an {\em "isolated chaotic zone"} (ICZ), separated from the rest of the chaotic phase space, remains localized around an AM fixed point for long times even when this point is partially stable in only a few phase-space directions and despite the fact that Kolmogorov-Arnol'd-Moser tori are not isolating. The time evolution of the mean kinetic energy of an initial ensemble containing an ICZ exhibits {\em superdiffusion} instead of normal chaotic diffusion.

nlin.CD↗

arXiv2020

Periodic and aperiodic dynamics of flat bands in diamond-octagon lattice

We drive periodically a two-dimensional diamond-octagon lattice model by switching between two Hamiltonian corresponding two different magnetic flux piercing through diamond plaquette to investigate the generation of topological flat bands. We show that in this way, the flatness and topological nature of all the bands of the model can be tuned and Floquet quasi-sates can be made topologically flat while its static counterpart does not support the existence of topology and flatness together. By redefining the flatness accordingly in the context of non-equilibrium dynamics and correctly justifying it using the Floquet joint density of states, one indeed obtains a better control of the desired result when the input parameter space composed of temporal window associated with the step Hamiltonian and flux becomes larger than the static parameter space consisting of magnetic flux only. Interestingly, we find the generation of flux current. We systematically analyse the work done and flux current in the asymptotic limit as a function of input parameters to show that topology and flatness both share a close connection to the flux current and work done, respectively. We finally extend our investigation to the aperiodic array of step Hamiltonian, where we find that the heating up problem can be significantly reduced if the initial state is substantially flat as initial the large degeneracy of states prevents the system from absorbing energy easily from the aperiodic driving. We additionally show that the heating can be reduced if the values of the magnetic flux in the step Hamiltonian are small, the duration of these flux are unequal and on the initial flatness of the band. We successfully explain our finding by plausible analytical arguments.

cond-mat.stat-mech↗

arXiv2019

Characterizations of prethermal states in periodically driven many-body systems with unbounded chaotic diffusion

We introduce well-defined characterizations of prethermal states in realistic periodically driven many-body systems with unbounded chaotic diffusion of the kinetic energy. These systems, interacting arrays of periodically kicked rotors, are paradigmatic models of many-body chaos theory. We show that the prethermal states in these systems are well described by a generalized Gibbs ensemble based essentially on the average Hamiltonian. The latter is the quasi-conserved quantity in the prethermal state and the ensemble is characterized by the temperature of the state. An explicit exact expression for this temperature is derived. Also, using arguments based on chaos theory, we demonstrate that the lifetime of the prethermal state is exponentially long in the inverse of the temperature. Our analytical results, in particular those for the temperature and the lifetime of the prethermal state, agree well with numerical observations.

cond-mat.stat-mech↗

arXiv2018

Stability and pre-thermalization in chains of classical kicked rotors

Periodic drives are a common tool to control physical systems, but have a limited applicability because time-dependent drives generically lead to heating. How to prevent the heating is a fundamental question with important practical implications. We address this question by analyzing a chain of coupled kicked rotors, and find two situations in which the heating rate can be arbitrarily small: (i) linear stability, for initial conditions close to a fixed point, and (ii) marginal localization, for drives with large frequencies and small amplitudes. In both cases, we find that the dynamics shows universal scaling laws that allow us to distinguish localized, diffusive, and sub-diffusive regimes. The marginally localized phase has common traits with recently discovered pre-thermalized phases of many-body quantum-Hamiltonian systems, but does not require quantum coherence.

cond-mat.dis-nn↗

arXiv2017

Entanglement entropy of a three-spin interacting spin chain with a time-reversal breaking impurity at one boundary

We investigate the effect of a time-reversal breaking impurity term on both the equilibrium and non-equilibrium critical properties of entanglement entropy (EE) in a three-spin interacting transverse Ising model which can be mapped to a one-dimensional p-wave superconductor with next-nearest-neighbor hopping. Due to the presence of next-nearest-neighbor hopping, a new topological phase with two zero-energy Majorana modes at each end of an open chain appears in the phase diagram. We show that the derivative of EE with respect to one of the parameters of the Hamiltonian can detect the quantum phase transitions by exhibiting cusp like structure at those points; impurity strength ($\la_d$) can substantially modify the peak/dip height associated with the cusp. Importantly, we find that the logarithmic scaling of the EE with block size remains unaffected by the application of the impurity term, although, the coefficient (i.e., central charge) varies logarithmically with the impurity strength for a lower range of $\la_d$ and eventually saturates with an exponential damping factor ($\sim \exp(-\la_d)$) for the phase boundaries shared with the phase containing two Majorana edge modes. On the other hand, it receives a linear correction in term of $\la_d$ for an another phase boundary. Finally, we focus to study the effect of the impurity in the time evolution of the EE for the critical quenching case where impurity term is applied only to the final Hamiltonian. Interestingly, it has been shown that for all the phase boundaries in contrary to the equilibrium case, the saturation value of the EE increases logarithmically with the strength of impurity in a certain region of $\la_d$ and finally, for higher values of $\la_d$, it increases very slowly which is dictated by an exponential damping factor.

cond-mat.stat-mech↗

arXiv2017

Survival probability in a quenched Majorana chain with an impurity

We investigate the dynamics of a one-dimensional $p$-wave superconductor with next-nearest-neighbor hopping and superconducting interaction derived from a three-spin interacting Ising model in transverse field by mapping to Majorana fermions. The next-nearest-neighbor hopping term leads a new topological phase containing two zero-energy Majorana modes at each end of an open chain, compared to a nearest-neighbor $p$-wave superconducting chain. We study the Majorana survival probability (MSP) of a particular Majorana edge state when the initial Hamiltonian ($H_i$) is changed to the quantum critical as well as off-critical final Hamiltonian ($H_f$) which additionally contains an impurity term ($H_{imp}$) that breaks the time-reversal invariance. For the off-critical quenching inside the new topological phase with $H_f= H_i +H_{imp}$, and small impurity strength ($λ_d$), we observe a perfect oscillation of the MSP as a function of time with a single frequency (determined by the impurity strength $λ_d$) that can be analyzed from an equivalent two-level problem. On the other hand, the MSP shows a beating like structure with time for quenching to the phase boundary separating the topological phase (with two edge Majoranas at each edge) and the non-topological phase where the additional frequency is given by inverse of the system size. We attribute this behavior of the MSP to the modification of the energy levels of the final Hamiltonian due to the application of the impurity term.

cond-mat.stat-mech↗

arXiv2017

Complete characterization of spin chains with two Ising symmetries

Spin chains with two Ising symmetries are the Jordan-Wigner duals of one-dimensional interacting fermions with particle-hole and time-reversal symmetry. From earlier works on Majorana chains, it is known that this class of models has 10 distinct topological phases. In this paper, we analyze the physical properties of the correspondent 10 phases of the spin model. In particular, thanks to a set of two non-commuting dualities, we determine the local and non-local order parameters of the phases. We find that 4 phases are topologically protected by the Ising symmetries, while the other 6 break at least one symmetry. Our study highlights the non-trivial relation between the topological classifications of interacting bosons and fermions.

cond-mat.str-el↗

arXiv2017

Possible Ergodic-nonergodic regions in the quantum Sherrington-Kirkpatrick spin glass model and quantum annealing

We explore the behavior of order parameter distribution of quantum Sherrington-Kirkpatrick model in the spin glass phase using Monte Carlo technique for the effective Suzuki-Trotter Hamil- tonian at finite temperatures and that at zero temperature obtained using exact diagonalization method. Our numerical results indicate the existence of low but finite temperature quantum fluc- tuation dominated ergodic region along with the classical fluctuation dominated high temperature nonergodic region in the spin glass phase of the model. In the ergodic region, the order parameter distribution gets narrower around the most probable value of the order parameter as the system size increases. In the other region, the Parisi order distribution function has non-vanishing value every- where in thermodynamic limit, indicating nonergodicity. We also show, that the average annealing time for convergence (to a low energy level of the model; within a small error range) becomes system size independent for annealing down through the (quantum fluctuation dominated) ergodic region. It becomes strongly system size dependent for annealing through the nonergodic region. Possible finite size scaling type behavior for the extent of the ergodic region is also addressed.

cond-mat.stat-mech↗

arXiv2015

Effect of double local quenches on Loschmidt echo and entanglement entropy of a one-dimensional quantum system

We study the effect of two simultaneous local quenches on the evolution of Loschmidt echo and entanglement entropy of a one dimensional transverse Ising model. In this work, one of the local quenches involves the connection of two spin-1/2 chains at a certain time and the other local quench corresponds to a sudden change in the magnitude of the transverse field at a given site in one of the spin chains. We numerically calculate the dynamics associated with the Loschmidt echo and the entanglement entropy as a result of such double quenches, and discuss various timescales involved in this problem using the picture of quasiparticles generated as a result of such quenches.

cond-mat.stat-mech↗