arXiv subjects

Fernando Iemini

Publications and source records attributed to Fernando Iemini.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Quantum Synchronization

Natural and engineered classical systems are replete with examples of synchronization, understood as the adjustment of rhythms of physical systems. Such synchronization is at the heart of the stability of several classical technologies, such as mechanical bridges and electrical networks. Given the advent of quantum simulation and computation technologies, it is natural to study a quantum analogue of synchronization and explore novel applications. This review surveys synchronization in few and many-body quantum systems, measures that quantify them, and their applications to quantum technologies.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2026

Controlling Waiting Time Statistics in Monitored Collective Spins: Mitigating Detector's Resolution Barrier in Measurement-Induced Phase Transitions

In collective dissipative spin systems, the postselection barrier can be partially mitigated; however, a further obstacle may be posed by the finite temporal resolution of detectors. In this work, we investigate how initial-state inhomogeneities can control waiting-time statistics between quantum jumps, thereby mitigating the detector-resolution problem. We consider a collectively monitored spin model with a boundary time-crystalline phase, introducing inhomogeneity by partitioning the ensemble into two subsystems rotated by an angle $\theta$. We find that the measurement-induced phase transition survives under inhomogeneities, with different entanglement scaling regimes. The waiting time increases with $\theta$, scaling as $1/N$ but with a prefactor strongly enhanced by orders of magnitude, and in the anti-aligned limit $\theta = \pi$ it remains finite, fully resolving the resolution barrier. This mitigation, however, comes at a cost: the entanglement saturation time becomes significantly longer, partially reintroducing the postselection barrier. Our results highlight a trade-off between detector resolution and postselection overhead, with direct implications for the experimental observation of measurement-induced phenomena.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2026

Quantum Trajectory Entanglement in Seeded Boundary Time Crystals

We investigate the entanglement dynamics along quantum trajectories during the seeding of time-crystalline order in a boundary time crystal (BTC). Specifically, how entanglement spreads among different spin ensembles when a BTC attempts to seed its time-crystalline behavior onto otherwise static spin ensembles, through a collective dissipative channel. We analyse both the dynamical growth of entanglement in time and the steady-state properties of the system. Our results reveal two fundamentally distinct regimes. In the seeded BTC phase, the steady-state entanglement entropy between the ensembles grows with system size $N$, accompanied by macroscopic fluctuations along the trajectories. In contrast, in the non-seeded static phase, both the steady-state entanglement and its fluctuations decay exponentially with $N$. The model thus features a measurement-induced phase transition (MIPT) driven by the seeding mechanism. Furthermore, these findings establish dissipative seeding as a powerful mechanism for controlling quantum correlations in open many-body systems, with direct experimental relevance to this class of model without a postselection barrier.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2026

Optimal observables for quantum-enhanced sensing and applications in a Floquet time crystal sensor

In this work, we discuss how to determine and implement feasible optimal observables for a metrology protocol that saturates the quantum Fisher information (QFI) bound. In particular, we focus our study on a simple protocol, namely the method of moments (MoM). We first demonstrate that the symmetric logarithmic derivative (SLD) operator, a Hermitian observable, once implemented in the MoM, saturates the QFI bound. However, the SLD is generally too complex and typically non-local, rendering its direct experimental realization unfeasible. To overcome this limitation, we explore its structure in a specific sensing model - a Floquet time crystal (FTC) acting as an ac field sensor - and show that the SLD can be approximated by substantially simpler observables, such as the bare spin magnetization or a parity observable, for different relevant initial state preparations. We further corroborate our theoretical predictions in a nuclear magnetic resonance system operating as an FTC sensor, employing experimentally motivated parameters to simulate its performance in a state-of-the-art implementation. In general, our results establish a practical route toward near-optimal metrology in FTC sensors, where the inaccessible SLD operator can be replaced by simpler observables while retaining quantum-enhanced sensitivity.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2026

Sensing ac fields with quantum many-body scars

Quantum many-body scars (MBS) exhibit weak ergodicity breaking and long-lived coherent dynamics within an otherwise thermal spectrum. We investigate their metrological properties using the quantum Fisher information (QFI), focusing on estimating the amplitude of a weak AC field in the PXP model. We show that the approximately uniform energy spacing of the scar tower enables collective resonant processes when the driving frequency matches integer multiples of the scar gap, resulting in a quadratic-in-time growth of the QFI over an extended time window. We analyze how the connectivity induced by different probe operators shapes sensing performance and demonstrate that staggered magnetization leads to a more favorable growth of the QFI with system size than homogeneous magnetization. Through frequency scanning and finite-size analysis, we characterize the scaling of the QFI with the number of particles. Finally, we develop a single-tower approximation under resonant driving, deriving a compact analytical expression that captures the time dependence and system-size scaling of the QFI. Our results establish how to leverage structured non-ergodic dynamics in quantum sensing protocols.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2026

Stochastic Quantum Information Geometry and Speed Limits at the Trajectory Level

In quantum metrology, precision is typically characterized by an ensemble-averaged quantity, the quantum Fisher information (QFI), which averages over the fluctuations of individual measurement records. Here we introduce the conditional quantum Fisher information (CQFI), a trajectory-level version of the QFI that generalizes the classical stochastic Fisher information to the quantum domain. Defined through the symmetric logarithmic derivative and conditioned on a measurement outcome, the CQFI is a random variable whose average recovers the QFI. Using it, we derive a trajectory-level quantum speed limit, illustrated by the quantum-jump unraveling of a driven thermal qubit. Moreover, the CQFI decomposes into incoherent (population) and coherent (basis-rotation) contributions, together with an interference cross-term. This cross-term vanishes on average but can take negative values along single trajectories, providing a local witness of destructive interference between classical and quantum information channels.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2025

Exact analysis of AC sensors based on Floquet time crystals

We discuss the behavior of general Floquet time crystals (FTCs), including prethermal ones, in closed systems acting as AC sensors. We provide an analytical treatment of their quantum Fisher information (QFI) dynamics, which characterizes the ultimate sensor accuracy. By tuning the direction and frequency of the AC field, we show how to induce transitions resonantly between macroscopic paired cat states in the FTC sensor. This allows for robust Heisenberg scaling precision (QFI $\sim N^2 t^2$) for exponentially long times in the system size. The QFI dynamics exhibit, moreover, a characteristic step-like structure in time due to the eventual dephasing along the cat subspaces. The behavior is discussed for various initial sensor preparations, including ground states and low- and high-correlated states. Furthermore, we examine the performance of the sensor along the FTC phase transition, with the QFI capturing its critical exponents. Our findings are presented for both linear and nonlinear response regimes and illustrated for a specific FTC based on the long-range interacting LMG model.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2025

Thermodynamic interpretation to Stochastic Fisher Information and Single-Trajectory Speed Limits

The Fisher information (FI) metric is a Riemannian metric that allows a geometric treatment of stochastic thermodynamics, introducing the possibility of computing thermodynamic lengths and deviations from equilibrium. At the trajectory level, a related quantity can be introduced, the stochastic Fisher information (SFI), which on average, is equivalent to the FI. In this work, we discuss two fundamental questions regarding the SFI; namely, (i) what is the thermodynamic interpretation to the SFI, and (ii) are there any trajectory-level thermodynamic bounds . We find that, contrary to previous results in the literature for the FI, the thermodynamic interpretation of the SFI depends only on the entropy produced by the system and on the thermodynamic force. Moreover, we find that the SFI allows one to derive single-trajectory speed limits, which we demonstrate to hold for a Brownian particle under a saturating drive force and a Brownian particle under a decreasing drive force. From the ensemble of single-trajectory bounds, one can derive a hierarchy of average speed limits that are always less tight than the one derived from the FI. We test our results for speed limits on the adopted models and find that the hierarchy of average speed limits is respected and that the single-trajectory speed limits behave qualitatively similar to the average and stochastic speed limits, with some trajectories achieving velocities higher than the tightest average bound whenever it does not saturate. Our results open avenues for the exploration of uncertainty relations at the trajectory level.

cond-mat.stat-mech↗

arXiv2025

Roadmap on Quantum Thermodynamics

The last two decades has seen quantum thermodynamics become a well established field of research in its own right. In that time, it has demonstrated a remarkably broad applicability, ranging from providing foundational advances in the understanding of how thermodynamic principles apply at the nano-scale and in the presence of quantum coherence, to providing a guiding framework for the development of efficient quantum devices. Exquisite levels of control have allowed state-of-the-art experimental platforms to explore energetics and thermodynamics at the smallest scales which has in turn helped to drive theoretical advances. This Roadmap provides an overview of the recent developments across many of the field's sub-disciplines, assessing the key challenges and future prospects, providing a guide for its near term progress.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2024

Information scrambling and entanglement dynamics in Floquet Time Crystals

We study the dynamics of out-of-time-ordered correlators (OTOCs) and entanglement of entropy as quantitative measures of information propagation in disordered many-body systems exhibiting Floquet time-crystal (FTC) phases. We find that OTOC spreads in the FTC with different characteristic timescales due to the existence of a preferred ``quasi-protected'' direction - denoted as $\ell$-bit direction - along which the spins stabilize their period-doubling magnetization for exponentially long times. While orthogonal to this direction the OTOC thermalizes as an usual MBL time-independent system (at stroboscopic times), along the $\ell$-bit direction the system features a more complex structure. The scrambling appears as a combination of an initially frozen dynamics (while in the stable period doubling magnetization time window) and a later logarithmic slow growth (over its decoherence regime) till full thermalization. Interestingly, in the late time regime, since the wavefront propagation of correlations has already settled through the whole chain, scrambling occurs at the same rate regardless of the distance between the spins, thus resulting in an overall envelope-like structure of all OTOCs, independent of their distance, merging into a single growth. Alongside, the entanglement entropy shows a logarithmic growth over all time, reflecting the slow dynamics up to a thermal volume-law saturation.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2024

Prethermal Floquet time crystals in chiral multiferroic chains and applications as quantum sensors of AC fields

We study the emergence of prethermal Floquet Time Crystal (pFTC) in disordered chiral multiferroic chains. The model is an extension of the usual periodically driven nearest-neighbor disordered Heisenberg chain, with additional next-nearest-neighbor Heisenberg couplings and DMI interactions due to external magnetic and electric couplings. We derive the phase diagram of the model, characterizing the magnetization, entanglement, and coherence dynamics of the system along the extended interactions. In addition, we explore the application of the pFTC as quantum sensors of AC fields. The sensor performance to estimate small AC fields is quantified through the quantum Fisher information (QFI) measure. The sensor offers several advantages as compared to those composed of non-interacting spins due to its intrinsic robustness, long coherent interrogation time, and many-body correlations. Specifically, the sensor can overcome the standard quantum limit ($\rm{SQL} \sim N t^2$) during the prethermal regime, reaching an optimum performance at the pFTC lifetime $t^*$, where the $\rm{QFI}/Nt^{*^2} \sim N^\alpha$ with $\alpha > 0$, scaling superlinarly with the number of spins. Different from \text{full} FTCs, the prethermal lifetime does not diverge in the thermodynamic limit, nevertheless it can be increasingly long with tuning system parameters.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2024

Lindbladian reverse engineering for general non-equilibrium steady states: A scalable null-space approach

The study of open system dynamics is of paramount importance both from its fundamental aspects as well as from its potential applications in quantum technologies. In the simpler and most commonly studied case, the dynamics of the system can be described by a Lindblad master equation. However, identifying the Lindbladian that leads to general non-equilibrium steady states (NESS) is usually a non-trivial and challenging task. Here we introduce a method for reconstructing the corresponding Lindbaldian master equation given any target NESS, i.e., a \textit{Lindbladian Reverse Engineering} ($\mathcal{L}$RE) approach. The method maps the reconstruction task to a simple linear problem. Specifically, to the diagonalization of a correlation matrix whose elements are NESS observables and whose size scales linearly (at most quadratically) with the number of terms in the Hamiltonian (Lindblad jump operator) ansatz. The kernel (null-space) of the correlation matrix corresponds to Lindbladian solutions. Moreover, the map defines an iff condition for $\mathcal{L}$RE, which works as both a necessary and a sufficient condition; thus, it not only defines, if possible, Lindbladian evolutions leading to the target NESS, but also determines the feasibility of such evolutions in a proposed setup. We illustrate the method in different systems, ranging from bosonic Gaussian systems, dissipative-driven collective spins and random local spin models.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2024

Boundary Time Crystals as AC sensors: enhancements and constraints

We investigate the use of a boundary time crystals (BTCs) as quantum sensors of AC fields. Boundary time crystals are non-equilibrium phases of matter in contact to an environment, for which a macroscopic fraction of the many-body system breaks the time translation symmetry. We find an enhanced sensitivity of the BTC when its spins are resonant with the applied AC field, as quantified by the quantum Fisher information (QFI). The QFI dynamics in this regime is shown to be captured by a relatively simple ansatz consisting of an initial power-law growth and late-time exponential decay. We study the scaling of the ansatz parameters with resources (encoding time and number of spins) and identify a moderate quantum enhancement in the sensor performance through comparison with classical QFI bounds. Investigating the precise source of this performance, we find that despite of its long coherence time and multipartite correlations (advantageous properties for quantum metrology), the entropic cost of the BTC (which grows indefinitely in the thermodynamic limit) hinders an optimal decoding of the AC field information. This result has implications for future candidates of quantum sensors in open system and we hope it will encourage future study into the role of entropy in quantum metrology.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2023

Dynamics of inhomogeneous spin ensembles with all-to-all interactions: breaking permutational invariance

We investigate the consequences of introducing non-uniform initial conditions in the dynamics of spin ensembles characterized by all-to-all interactions. Specifically, our study involves the preparation of a set of semi-classical spin ensembles with varying orientations. Through this setup, we explore the influence of such non-uniform initial states on the disruption of permutational invariance. Comparing this approach to the traditional scenario of initializing with spins uniformly aligned, we find that the dynamics of the spin ensemble now spans a more expansive effective Hilbert space. This enlargement arises due to the inclusion of off-diagonal coherences between distinct total angular momentum subspaces - an aspect typically absent in conventional treatments of all-to-all spin dynamics. Conceptually, the dynamic evolution can be understood as a composite of multiple homogeneous sub-ensembles navigating through constrained subspaces. Notably, observables that are sensitive to the non-uniformity of initial conditions exhibit discernible signatures of these off-diagonal coherences. We adopt this fresh perspective to reexamine the relaxation phenomena exhibited by the Dicke model, as well as a prototypical example of a boundary time crystal. Intriguingly, ensembles initialized with inhomogeneous initial conditions can show distinctive behaviors when contrasted with canonical instances of collective dynamics. These behaviors encompass the emergence of novel gapless excitations, the manifestation of limit-cycles featuring dressed frequencies due to superradiance, instances of frequency locking or beating synchronizations, and even the introduction of ``extra'' dimensions within the dynamics. In closing, we provide a brief overview of the potential implications of our findings in the context of modern cavity quantum electrodynamics (QED) platforms.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2023

Floquet time-crystals as sensors of AC fields

The long range spatial and temporal ordering displayed by discrete time crystals, can become advantageous properties when used for sensing extremely weak signals. Here, we investigate their performance as quantum sensors of weak AC-fields and demonstrate, using the quantum Fisher information measure, that they can overcome the shot noise limit while allowing long interrogation times. In such systems, collective interactions stabilize their dynamics against noise making them robust enough to protocol imperfections.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2023

Fermionic anyons: entanglement and quantum computation from a resource-theoretic perspective

Quantum computational models can be approached via the lens of resources needed to perform computational tasks, where a computational advantage is achieved by consuming specific forms of quantum resources, or, conversely, resource-free computations are classically simulable. Can we similarly identify quantum computational resources in the setting of more general quasi-particle statistics? In this work, we develop a framework to characterize the separability of a specific type of one-dimensional quasiparticle known as a fermionic anyon. As we evince, the usual notion of partial trace fails in this scenario, so we build the notion of separability through a fractional Jordan-Wigner transformation, leading to an entanglement description of fermionic-anyon states. We apply this notion of fermionic-anyon separability, and the unitary operations that preserve it, mapping it to the free resources of matchgate circuits. We also identify how entanglement between two qubits encoded in a dual-rail manner, as standard for matchgate circuits, corresponds to the notion of entanglement between fermionic anyons.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2022

Sufficient condition for gapless spin-boson Lindbladians, and its connection to dissipative time-crystals

We discuss a sufficient condition for gapless excitations in the Lindbladian master equation for collective spin-boson systems and permutationally invariant systems. The condition relates a nonzero macroscopic cumulant correlation in the steady state to the presence of gapless modes in the Lindbladian. In phases arising from competing coherent and dissipative Lindbladian terms, we argue that such gapless modes, concomitant with angular momentum conservation, can lead to persistent dynamics in the spin observables with the possible formation of dissipative time-crystals. We study different models within this perspective, from Lindbladians with Hermitian jump operators, to non-Hermitian ones composed by collective spins and Floquet spin-boson systems. We also provide a simple analytical proof for the exactness of mean-field semiclassical approach in such systems based on a cumulant expansion.

cond-mat.stat-mech↗

arXiv2022

Continuous phase transition induced by non-Hermiticity in the quantum contact process model

Non-Hermitian quantum system recently have attracted a lots of attentions theoretically and experimentally. However, the results based on the single-particle picture may not apply to understand the property of non-Hermitian many-body system. How the property of quantum many-body system especially the phase transition will be affected by the non-hermiticity remains unclear. Here we study non-Hermitian quantum contact process (QCP) model, whose effective Hamiltonian is derived from Lindbladian master equation. We show that there is a continuous phase transition induced by the non-hermiticity in QCP. We also determine the critical exponents $\beta$ of order parameter, $\gamma$ of susceptibility and study the correlation and entanglement near phase transition. We observe that the order parameter and susceptibility display infinitely singularity even for finite size system, since non-hermiticity endow many-body system with different singular behaviour from classical phase transition. Moreover our results show that the phase transition have no counterpart in Hermitian case and belongs to completely different universality class.

quant-ph↗