arXiv subjects

Qicheng Tang

Publications and source records attributed to Qicheng Tang.

18 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Exactly solvable non-unitary conformal interfaces in unitary CFTs

We construct directly on the lattice a class of non-unitary interfaces that are both exactly conformal and exactly solvable, and establish their corresponding boundary and interface conformal field theory (CFT) descriptions. The construction is obtained by analytically continuing the scattering data of known exact unitary conformal interfaces on the lattice, yielding an $SL(2,\mathbb C)$-parametrized family, which is non-compact and breaks probability-current conservation. Exploiting the exact lattice-continuum correspondence, we derive the conformal boundary states in the folded picture. We show that a proper definition of the Hilbert space in the closed-string channel requires the incoming and outgoing boundary states to be specified independently by boundary data associated with a pair of dual biorthogonal bases, in close analogy with the right and left eigenvectors of a non-Hermitian Hamiltonian. This requirement determines a consistent CFT construction of non-unitary boundaries and interfaces, and leads to a non-unitary generalization of the conventional Cardy's condition for unitary boundary CFT. Beyond their formal construction, these non-unitary interfaces are shown to exhibit logarithmic entanglement scaling governed by an effective central charge that is generally complex. For the $SU(1,1)$ subclass, the effective central charge remains real but grows without bound as the transmission coefficient increases. This result is demonstrated through analytical and numerical lattice calculations, as well as an interface CFT analysis in the unfolded picture. Finally, we present a general CFT analysis of a class of global quantum quenches whose initial states are prepared with non-unitary boundaries. We relate their effective temperature to the conformal dimension of the boundary-condition-changing operators associated with non-unitary boundary conditions.

cond-mat.stat-mech↗

arXiv2026

Exact operator dynamics in Lindbladian Wess-Zumino-Witten conformal field theories

Understanding the time evolution of physical observables in open quantum many-body systems coupled to external environments is a natural and difficult problem, and exact results are still rare. In this work, we study this problem for Wess-Zumino-Witten (WZW) conformal field theories with Lindblad jump operators linear in Kac-Moody current modes. We investigate the exact operator dynamics generated by these Lindbladians, identifying classes of current operators whose Heisenberg equations close and can therefore be solved analytically using the underlying current algebra. In Abelian $U(1)_k$ WZW theories, this closure of operator dynamics holds for arbitrary settings of jump rates and includes exactly tractable cooling dynamics. In contrast, for non-Abelian WZW theories, exact closure occurs only for symmetric current-mode dissipation, where upward and downward current-mode transitions occur with equal rates, and even then it leads to a simple closed evolution only for a single current operator. Generic imbalances, including those needed for cooling, produce additional non-Abelian terms and prevent closure of the opeartor dynamics. Consequently, the current algebra gives rise to a broad family of exactly solvable dissipative dynamics in the Abelian setting, whereas in the non-Abelian case it singles out only a special exactly solvable dynamics corresponding to an infinite-temperature bath.

cond-mat.stat-mech↗

arXiv2026

COMPOSITE-Stem

AI agents hold growing promise for accelerating scientific discovery; yet, a lack of frontier evaluations hinders adoption into real workflows. Expert-written benchmarks have proven effective at measuring AI reasoning, but most at this stage have become saturated and only measure performance on constrained outputs. To help address this gap, we introduce COMPOSITE-STEM, a benchmark of 70 expert-written tasks in physics, biology, chemistry, and mathematics, curated by doctoral-level researchers. Our benchmark combines exact-match grading and criterion-based rubrics with an LLM-as-a-jury grading protocol, allowing more flexible assessment of scientifically meaningful outputs. Using an adapted multimodal Terminus-2 agent harness within the Harbor agentic evaluation framework, we evaluate four frontier models. The top-performing model achieves 21%, demonstrating that COMPOSITE-STEM captures capabilities beyond current agent reach. All tasks are open-sourced with contributor permission to support reproducibility and to promote additional research towards AI's acceleration of scientific progress in these domains.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2026

AgentIF-OneDay: A Task-level Instruction-Following Benchmark for General AI Agents in Daily Scenarios

The capacity of AI agents to effectively handle tasks of increasing duration and complexity continues to grow, demonstrating exceptional performance in coding, deep research, and complex problem-solving evaluations. However, in daily scenarios, the perception of these advanced AI capabilities among general users remains limited. We argue that current evaluations prioritize increasing task difficulty without sufficiently addressing the diversity of agentic tasks necessary to cover the daily work, life, and learning activities of a broad demographic. To address this, we propose AgentIF-OneDay, aimed at determining whether general users can utilize natural language instructions and AI agents to complete a diverse array of daily tasks. These tasks require not only solving problems through dialogue but also understanding various attachment types and delivering tangible file-based results. The benchmark is structured around three user-centric categories: Open Workflow Execution, which assesses adherence to explicit and complex workflows; Latent Instruction, which requires agents to infer implicit instructions from attachments; and Iterative Refinement, which involves modifying or expanding upon ongoing work. We employ instance-level rubrics and a refined evaluation pipeline that aligns LLM-based verification with human judgment, achieving an 80.1% agreement rate using Gemini-3-Pro. AgentIF-OneDay comprises 104 tasks covering 767 scoring points. We benchmarked four leading general AI agents and found that agent products built based on APIs and ChatGPT agents based on agent RL remain in the first tier simultaneously. Leading LLM APIs and open-source models have internalized agentic capabilities, enabling AI application teams to develop cutting-edge Agent products.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

Universal and Maximal Entanglement Swapping in General Fermionic Gaussian States

Exploring universal entanglement structure in many-body systems is both fundamental and challenging, particularly when the system undergoes non-unitary operations. In this work, we uncover a universal mechanism for realizing maximal entanglement swapping in fermionic Gaussian states subjected to projective Bell measurements. We consider two initially decoupled, half-filled copies of a free-fermion system in arbitrary dimensions and perform post-selective Bell measurements on half of the corresponding sites across the two copies. Remarkably, the post-measurement state factorizes into a product of Bell pairs, establishing maximal interlayer entanglement entirely independent of the initial Gaussian state. We derive this post-measurement state exactly for general particle-number-conserving fermionic Gaussian states, establishing both the validity and universality of the mechanism, with numerical simulations serving as consistency checks. This phenomenon arises from a robust interplay between fermionic statistics and Gaussianity, revealing a distinct fermionic route to measurement-induced maximal entanglement.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2025

Boundary Criticality of Complex Conformal Field Theory: A Case Study in the Non-Hermitian 5-State Potts Model

Conformal fields with boundaries give rise to rich critical phenomena that can reveal information about the underlying conformality. While most existing studies focus on Hermitian systems, here we explore boundary critical phenomena in a non-Hermitian quantum 5-state Potts model which exhibits complex conformality in the bulk. We identify free, fixed and mixed conformal boundary conditions and observe the conformal tower structure of energy spectra, supporting the emergence of conformal boundary criticality. We also studied the duality relation between different conformal boundary conditions under the Kramers-Wannier transformation. These findings should facilitate a comprehensive understanding for complex CFTs and stimulate further exploration on the boundary critical phenomena within non-Hermitian strongly-correlated systems.

cond-mat.stat-mech↗

arXiv2025

Dissipation meets conformal interface in open quantum systems: How the relaxation rate is suppressed

Conformal interfaces play an important role in quantum critical systems. In closed systems, the transmission properties of conformal interfaces are typically characterized by two quantities: One is the effective central charge $c_{\text{eff}}$, which measures the amount of quantum entanglement through the interface, and the other is the transmission coefficient $c_{\text{LR}}$, which measures the energy transmission through the interface. In the present work, to characterize the transmission property of conformal interfaces in open quantum systems, we propose a third quantity $c_{\text{relax}}$, which is defined through the ratio of Liouvillian gaps with and without an interface. Physically, $c_{\text{relax}}$ measures the suppression of the relaxation rate towards a steady state when the system is subject to a local dissipation. We perform both analytical perturbation calculations and exact numerical calculations based on a free fermion chain at the critical point. It is found that $c_{\text{relax}}$ decreases monotonically with the strength of the interface. In particular, $0\le c_{\text{relax}}\le c_{\text{LR}}\le c_{\text{eff}}$, where the equalities hold if and only if the interface is totally reflective or totally transmissive. Our result for $c_{\text{relax}}$ is universal in the sense that $c_{\text{relax}}$ is independent of (i) the dissipation strength in the weak dissipation regime and (ii) the location where the local dissipation is introduced. Comparing to the previously known $c_{\text{LR}}$ and $c_{\text{eff}}$ in a closed system, our $c_{\text{relax}}$ shows a distinct behavior as a function of the interface strength, suggesting its novelty to characterize conformal interfaces in open systems and offering insights into critical systems under dissipation.

cond-mat.str-el↗

arXiv2025

Probing prethermal nonergodicity through measurement outcomes of monitored quantum dynamics

Projective measurements are a key element in quantum physics and enable rich phenomena in monitored quantum dynamics. Here, we show that the measurement outcomes, recorded during monitored dynamics, can provide crucial information about the properties of the monitored dynamical system itself. We demonstrate this for a Floquet model of many-body localization, where we find that the prethermal many-body localized regime becomes unstable against rare measurements, yielding an unusual enhancement of quantum entanglement. Through an unsupervised learning and mutual information analysis on the classical dataset of measurement outcomes, we find that the information loss in the system, reflected by the increased entanglement, is compensated by an emergent structure in this classical dataset. Our findings highlight the crucial role of measurements and corresponding classical outcomes in capturing prethermal nonergodicity, offering a promising perspective for applications to other monitored quantum dynamics.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2024

A critical state under weak measurement is not critical

Critical systems host nontrivial entanglement structure that is generally sensitive to additional couplings. In the present work, we study the effect of weak measurements on the entanglement Hamiltonian of massless free fermions which are prepared in their critical ground state. While the power-law decaying correlation and logarithmic growing entanglement entropy have been observed as typical signatures of quantum criticality after the weak measurement, in this work we show that the conformal symmetry is lost and the entanglement Hamiltonian generally becomes gapped for arbitrary small measurement strength. To reveal this unconventional entanglement structure, we consider a field-theory description that allows us to establish an analytic mapping between the entanglement Hamiltonians before and after the weak measurements. From this mapping, we find that although the measurements lead to a significant modification of the entanglement spectrum, the real-space distribution of the eigenfunction of the kernel of entanglement Hamiltonian is unchanged, which is responsible for the coexistence of a gapped entanglement Hamiltonian and the logarithmic entanglement entropy. Moreover, as the mapping works for arbitrarily many disjoint intervals, the multi-interval entanglement entropy also exhibits the same scaling behavior as the critical ground state, and shares the same effective central charge with the single-interval case. We numerically demonstrate these field-theory results on a lattice model, where the entanglement Hamiltonian after weak measurements exhibits the typical signature of a finite gap and becomes long-ranged even in the single-interval case. This is distinct from the critical ground state, where the entanglement Hamiltonian for a single interval is gapless and local.

cond-mat.stat-mech↗

arXiv2024

Universal time evolution of string order parameter in quantum critical systems with boundary invertible or non-invertible symmetry breaking

The global symmetry, either invertible or non-invertible, has been extensively studied in two dimensional conformal field theories in recent years. When the theory is defined on a manifold with open boundaries, however, many interesting conformal boundary conditions will fully or partially break such global symmetry. In this work, we study the effect of symmetry-breaking boundaries or interfaces when the system is out of equilibrium. We show that the boundary or interface symmetry-breaking can be detected by the time evolution of string order parameters, which are constructed from the symmetry operators that implement the symmetry transformations. While the string order parameters are independent of time if the symmetry is preserved over the whole system, they evolve in time in a universal way if the boundary or interface breaks the symmetry. More explicitly, in the presence of boundary or interface symmetry-breaking, the string order parameters decay exponentially in time after a global quantum quench, and decay as a power-law in time after a local quantum quench. We also generalize our study to the case when the string order parameters are defined in a subsystem, which are related to the full counting statistics. It is found there are also universal features in the time evolution of string order parameters in this case. We verify our field theory results by studying the time evolution of these two different types of string order parameters in lattice models.

cond-mat.str-el↗

arXiv2024

Reclaiming the Lost Conformality in a non-Hermitian Quantum 5-state Potts Model

Conformal symmetry, emerging at critical points, can be lost when renormalization group fixed points collide. Recently, it was proposed that after collisions, real fixed points transition into the complex plane, becoming complex fixed points described by complex conformal field theories (CFTs). Although this idea is compelling, directly demonstrating such complex conformal fixed points in microscopic models remains highly demanding. Furthermore, these concrete models are instrumental in unraveling the mysteries of complex CFTs and illuminating a variety of intriguing physical problems, including weakly first-order transitions in statistical mechanics and the conformal window of gauge theories. In this work, we have successfully addressed this complex challenge for the (1+1)-dimensional quantum $5$-state Potts model, whose phase transition has long been known to be weakly first-order. By adding an additional non-Hermitian interaction, we successfully identify two conjugate critical points located in the complex parameter space, where the lost conformality is restored in a complex manner. Specifically, we unambiguously demonstrate the radial quantization of the complex CFTs and compute the operator spectrum, as well as new operator product expansion coefficients that were previously unknown.

cond-mat.stat-mech↗

arXiv2023

Universal entanglement signatures of interface conformal field theories

An interface connecting two distinct conformal field theories hosts rich critical behaviors. In this work, we investigate the entanglement properties of such critical interface theories for probing the underlying universality. As inspired by holographic perspectives, we demonstrate vital features of various entanglement measures regarding such interfaces based on several paradigmatic lattice models. Crucially, for two subsystems adjacent at the interface, the mutual information and the reflected entropy exhibit identical leading logarithmic scaling, giving an effective interface central charge that takes the same value as the smaller central charge of the two conformal field theories. Our work demonstrates that the entanglement measure offers a powerful tool to explore the rich physics in critical interface theories.

cond-mat.stat-mech↗

arXiv2022

Entanglement Entropy of $(2+1)$D Quantum Critical Points with Quenched Disorder: Dimensional Reduction Approach

A formidable perspective in understanding quantum criticality of a given many-body system is through its entanglement contents. Until now, most progress are only limited to the disorder-free case. Here, we develop an efficient scheme to compute the entanglement entropy of $(2+1)$-dimensional quantum critical points with randomness, from a conceptually novel angle where the quenched disorder can be considered as dimensionally reducible interactions. As a concrete example, we reveal novel entanglement signatures of $(2+1)$-dimensional Dirac fermion exposed to a random magnetic field, which hosts a class of emergent disordered quantum critical points. We demonstrate that the entanglement entropy satisfies the area-law scaling, and observe a modification of the area-law coefficient that points to the emergent disordered quantum criticality. Moreover, we also obtain the sub-leading correction to the entanglement entropy due to a finite correlation length. This sub-leading correction is found to be a universal function of the correlation length and disorder strength. We discuss its connection to the renormalization group flows of underlying theories.

cond-mat.str-el↗

arXiv2022

Thermal Correction to Entanglement Spectrum for Conformal Field Theories

We calculate the thermal correction to the entanglement spectrum for separating a single interval of two dimensional conformal field theories. Our derivation is a direct extension of the thermal correction to the Rényi entropy. Within a low-temperature expansion by including only the first excited state in the thermal density matrix, we approach analytical results of the thermal correction to the entanglement spectrum at both of the small and large interval limit. We find the temperature correction reduces the large eigenvalues in the entanglement spectrum while increases the small eigenvalues in the entanglement spectrum, leading to an overall crossover changing pattern of the entanglement spectrum. Crucially, at low-temperature limit, the thermal corrections are dominated by the first excited state and depend on its scaling dimension $Δ$ and degeneracy $g$. This opens an avenue to extract universal information of underlying conformal data via the thermal entanglement spectrum. All of these analytical computation is supported from numerical simulations using 1+1 dimensional free fermion. Finally, we extend our calculation to resolve the thermal correction to the symmetry-resolved entanglement spectrum.

hep-th↗

arXiv2021

Quantum criticality in the nonunitary dynamics of $(2+1)$-dimensional free fermions

We explore the nonunitary dynamics of $(2+1)$-dimensional free fermions and show that the obtained steady state is critical regardless the strength of the nonunitary evolution. Numerical results indicate that the entanglement entropy has a logarithmic violation of the area-law and the mutual information between two distant regions decays as a power-law function. In particular, we provide an interpretation of these scaling behaviors in terms of a simple quasiparticle pair picture. In addition, we study the dynamics of the correlation function and demonstrate that this system has dynamical exponent $z=1$. We further demonstrate the dynamics of the correlation function can be well captured by a classical nonlinear master equation. Our method opens a door to a vast number of nonunitary random dynamics in free fermions and can be generalized to any dimensions.

cond-mat.stat-mech↗

arXiv2020

Measurement-induced phase transition: A case study in the non-integrable model by density-matrix renormalization group calculations

We study the effect of local projective measurements on the quantum quench dynamics. As a concrete example, a one-dimensional Bose-Hubbard model is simulated by the matrix product state and time-evolving block decimation. We map out a global phase diagram in terms of the measurement rate in spatial space and time domain, which demonstrates a volume-to-area law entanglement phase transition. When the measurement rate reaches the critical value, we observe a logarithmic growth of entanglement entropy as the subsystem size or evolved time increases. Moreover, we find that the probability distribution of the single-site entanglement entropy distinguishes the volume and area law phases, similar to the case of disorder-induced many-body localization. We also investigate the scaling behavior of entanglement entropy and mutual information between two separated sites, which is indicative of a single universality class and thus suggests a possible unified description of this transition.

cond-mat.stat-mech↗

arXiv2019

Critical Scaling Behaviors of Entanglement Spectra

We investigate the evolution of entanglement spectra under a global quantum quench from a short-range correlated state to the quantum critical point. Motivated by the conformal mapping, we find that the dynamical entanglement spectra demonstrate distinct finite-size scaling behaviors from the static case. As a prototypical example, we compute real-time dynamics of the entanglement spectra of a one-dimensional transverse-field Ising chain. Numerical simulation confirms that, the entanglement spectra scale with the subsystem size $l$ as $\sim l^{-1}$ for the dynamical equilibrium state, much faster than $\propto \log^{-1} l$ for the critical ground state. In particular, as a byproduct, the entanglement spectra at the long time limit faithfully gives universal tower structure of underlying Ising criticality, which shows the emergence of operator-state correspondence in the quantum dynamics.

cond-mat.stat-mech↗

arXiv2019

Influence of hydrogen on electron-phonon coupling and intrinsic electrical resistivity in zirconium: a first-principles study

The paper presents the first-principle calculation of the electron-phonon coupling and the temperature dependence of the intrinsic electrical resistivity of the zirconium-hydrogen system with various hydrogen concentrations. The nature of the anomalous decrease in the electrical resistivity of the Zr-H system with the increase of hydrogen concentration (at the high concentrations of H/Zr$>$1.5) was studied. It was found that the hydrogen concentration, where the resistivity starts to decrease, is very close to the critical concentration of the $δ-\varepsilon$ phase transition. It was shown that the tetragonal lattice distortion due to the $δ-\varepsilon$ phase transition of the Zr-H system eliminates imaginary phonon frequencies and the strong electron-phonon coupling of the $δ$ phase and, as a result, leads to the reduction of the electrical resistivity of the Zr-H system at a high hydrogen concentration.

cond-mat.mtrl-sci↗