We investigate the out-of-equilibrium dynamics of quantum information in one-dimensional systems undergoing a quantum quench using a local perspective based on the information lattice. This framework provides a scale- and space-resolved decomposition of quantum correlations, enabling a hydrodynamic description of the information flow through well-defined local densities—termed local information—and currents. We apply this framework to three local quenches in noninteracting fermionic chains: (i) the release of a single particle into an empty tight-binding chain, (ii) the connection of two critical chains via the removal of a central barrier, and (iii) the coupling of a topological Kitaev chain to a critical chain. In each case, the information lattice reveals the local structure of correlation buildup and information interface effects, going beyond global measures such as the von Neumann entropy. In particular, through the information lattice, we uncover the signatures in the local information flow associated with topological edge modes and analytically explain the fractional von Neumann entropy values observed in Majorana quench protocols. Our approach is general and applicable to interacting, disordered, and open systems, providing a powerful tool for characterizing quantum information dynamics.

Thermalization, while ubiquitous in physics, has traditionally been viewed as an obstacle to be mitigated. In contrast, we demonstrate here the use of thermalization in the generation, control, and readout of "shell-like" spin textures with interacting 13C nuclear spins in diamond, wherein spins are polarized oppositely on either side of a critical radius. The textures span several nanometers and encompass many hundred spins; they are created and interrogated without manipulating the nuclear spins individually. Long-time stabilization is achieved via prethermalization to a Floquet-engineered Hamiltonian under the electronic gradient field: The texture is therefore metastable and robust against spin diffusion. This enables the state to endure over multiple minutes before it decays. Our work on spin-state engineering paves the way for applications in quantum simulation and nanoscale imaging.

Disorder can prevent many-body quantum systems from reaching thermal equilibrium, leading to a many-body localized phase. Recent works suggest that nonperturbative effects caused by rare regions of low disorder may destabilize the localized phase. However, numerical simulations of interacting systems are generically possible only for small system sizes, where finite-size effects might dominate. Here we perform a numerical investigation of noninteracting disordered spin chains coupled to a local Lindblad bath at the boundary. Our results reveal strong finite-size effects in the Lindbladian gap in both bath-coupled Anderson and Aubry-Andr & eacute;-Harper models, leading to a non-monotonic behavior with the system size. We discuss the relaxation properties of a simple toy model coupled to local Lindblad baths, connecting its features to those of noninteracting localized chains. We comment on the implications of our findings for many-body systems.

We propose a universal framework for classifying quantum states based on their scale-resolved correlation structure. Using the recently introduced information lattice, which provides an operational definition of the total amount of correlations at each scale, we define intrinsic characteristic length scales of quantum states. We analyze ground and midspectrum eigenstates of the disordered interacting Kitaev chain, showing that our framework provides a novel unbiased approach to quantum matter.

During time evolution of many-body systems entanglement grows rapidly, limiting exact simulations to small-scale systems or small timescales. Quantum information tends, however, to flow towards larger scales without returning to local scales, such that its detailed large-scale structure does not directly affect local observables. This allows for the removal of large-scale quantum information in a way that preserves all local observables and gives access to large-scale and large-time quantum dynamics. To this end, we use the recently introduced information lattice to organize quantum information into different scales, allowing us to define local information and information currents that we employ to systematically discard long-range quantum correlations in a controlled way. Our approach relies on decomposing the system into subsystems up to a maximum scale and time evolving the subsystem density matrices by solving the subsystem von Neumann equations in parallel. Importantly, the information flow needs to be preserved during the discarding of large-scale information. To achieve this without the need to make assumptions about the microscopic details of the information current, we introduce a second scale at which information is discarded, while using the state at the maximum scale to accurately obtain the information flow. The resulting algorithm, which we call local-information time evolution, is highly versatile and suitable for investigating many-body quantum dynamics in both closed and open quantum systems with diverse hydrodynamic behaviors. We present results for the energy transport in the mixed-field Ising model and the magnetization transport in the XX spin chain with onsite dephasing where we accurately determine the power-law exponent and the diffusion coefficients. Furthermore, the information lattice framework employed here promises to offer insightful results about the spatial and temporal behavior of entanglement in many-body systems.

We demonstrate that slow growth of the number entropy following a quench from a local product state is consistent with many-body localization. To do this, we construct a novel random circuit ℓ-bit model with exponentially localized ℓ-bits and exponentially decaying interactions between them. We observe an ultraslow growth of the number entropy starting from a Néel state, saturating at a value that grows with system size. This suggests that the observation of such growth in microscopic models is not sufficient to rule out many-body localization.

We investigate the critical behavior, both in space and time, of the wetting interface within the coexistence region around the first-order phase transition of a fully connected quantum Ising model in slab geometry. For that, we employ the Lindblad master equation formalism in which temperature is inherited by the coupling to a dissipative bath, rather than being a functional parameter as in the conventional Cahn's free energy. Lindblad's approach gives not only access to the dissipative dynamics and steady-state configuration of the quantum wetting interface throughout the whole phase diagram but also shows that the wetting critical behavior can be successfully exploited to characterize the phase diagram as an alternative to the direct evaluation of the free energies of the competing phases.

The jamming transition is ubiquitous. It is present in granular matter, foams, colloids, structural glasses, and many other systems. Yet, it defines a critical point whose properties still need to be fully understood. Recently, a major breakthrough came about when the replica formalism was extended to build a mean-field theory that provides an exact description of the jamming transition of spherical particles in the infinite-dimensional limit. While such theory explains the jamming critical behavior of both soft and hard spheres, investigating the transition in finite-dimensional systems poses very difficult and different problems, in particular from the numerical point of view. Soft particles are modeled by continuous potentials; thus, their jamming point can be reached through efficient energy minimization algorithms. In contrast, the latter methods are inapplicable to hard-sphere (HS) systems since the interaction energy among the particles is always zero by construction. To overcome these difficulties, here we recast the jamming of hard spheres as a constrained optimization problem and introduce the CALiPPSO algorithm, capable of readily producing jammed HS packings without including any effective potential. This algorithm brings a HS configuration of arbitrary dimensions to its jamming point by solving a chain of linear optimization problems. We show that there is a strict correspondence between the force balance conditions of jammed packings and the properties of the optimal solutions of CALiPPSO, whence we prove analytically that our packings are always isostatic and in mechanical equilibrium. Furthermore, using extensive numerical simulations, we show that our algorithm is able to probe the complex structure of the free-energy landscape, finding qualitative agreement with mean-field predictions. We also characterize the algorithmic complexity of CALiPPSO and provide an open-source implementation of it.

We propose a spatiotemporal characterization of the entanglement dynamics in many-body localized (MBL) systems, which exhibits a striking resemblance to dynamical heterogeneity in classical glasses. Specifically, we find that the relaxation times of local entanglement, as measured by the concurrence, are spatially correlated yielding a dynamical length scale for quantum entanglement. As a consequence of this spatiotemporal analysis, we observe that the considered MBL system is made up of dynamically correlated clusters with a size set by this entanglement length scale. The system decomposes into compartments of different activity such as active regions with fast quantum entanglement dynamics and inactive regions where the dynamics is slow. We further find that the relaxation times of the on-site concurrence become broadly distributed and more spatially correlated, as disorder increases or the energy of the initial state decreases. Through this spatiotemporal characterization of entanglement, our work unravels a previously unrecognized connection between the behavior of classical glasses and the genuine quantum dynamics of MBL systems.

We propose a universal framework for classifying quantum states based on their scale-resolved correlation structure. Using the recently introduced information lattice, which provides an operational definition of the total amount of correlations at each scale, we define intrinsic characteristic length scales of quantum states. We analyze ground and midspectrum eigenstates of the disordered interacting Kitaev chain, showing that our framework provides a novel unbiased approach to quantum matter.