We propose a new theoretical method to describe the monitored dynamics of bosonic many-body systems based on the concept of the most likely trajectory. We show how such trajectory can be identified from the probability distribution of quantum trajectories, i.e. measurement readouts, and how it successfully captures the monitored dynamics beyond the average state. We prove the method to be exact in the case of Gaussian theories and then extend it to the interacting Sine-Gordon model. Although no longer exact in this framework, the method captures the dynamics through a self-consistent time-dependent harmonic approximation and reveals an entanglement phase transition in the steady state from an area-law to a logarithmic-law scaling.

Gapless fracton quantum spin liquids are exotic phases of matter described by higher-rank U(1) gauge theories which host gapped and immobile fracton matter excitations as well as gapless photons. Despite well-known field theories, no spin models beyond purely classical systems have been identified to realize these phases. Using error-controlled Green function Monte Carlo, here we investigate a square lattice spin-1 model that shows precise signatures of a fracton quantum spin liquid without indications of conventional ordering. Specifically, the magnetic response exhibits characteristic patterns of suppressed pinch points that accurately match the prediction of a rank-2 U(1) field theory and reveals the existence of emergent photon excitations in 2+1 spacetime dimensions. Remarkably, this type of fracton quantum spin liquid is not only identified in the system's ground state but also in generic low-energy sectors of a strongly fragmented Hilbert space.

Recent work has shown that the entanglement of finite-temperature eigenstates in chaotic quantum many-body local Hamiltonians can be accurately described by an ensemble of random states with an internal $U(1)$ symmetry. We build upon this result to investigate the universal symmetry-breaking properties of such eigenstates. As a probe of symmetry breaking, we employ the entanglement asymmetry, a quantum information observable that quantifies the extent to which symmetry is broken in a subsystem. This measure enables us to explore the finer structure of finite-temperature eigenstates in terms of the $U(1)$-symmetric random state ensemble; in particular, the relation between the Hamiltonian and the effective conserved charge in the ensemble. Our analysis is supported by analytical calculations for the symmetric random states, as well as exact numerical results for the Mixed-Field Ising spin-$1/2$ chain, a paradigmatic model of quantum chaoticity.

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.

We solve the massless Schwinger model exactly in Hamiltonian formalism on a circle. We construct physical states explicitly and discuss the role of the spectral flow and nonperturbative vacua. Different thermodynamical correlation functions are calculated and after performing the analytical continuation are compared with the corresponding expressions obtained for the Schwinger model on the torus in Euclidean Path Integral formalism obtained before.

Magic describes the distance of a quantum state to its closest stabilizer state. It is -- like entanglement -- a necessary resource for a potential quantum advantage over classical computing. We study magic, quantified by stabilizer entropy, in a hybrid quantum circuit with projective measurements and a controlled injection of non-Clifford resources. We discover a phase transition between a (sub)-extensive and area law scaling of magic controlled by the rate of measurements. The same circuit also exhibits a phase transition in entanglement that appears, however, at a different critical measurement rate. This mechanism shows how, from the viewpoint of a potential quantum advantage, hybrid circuits can host multiple distinct transitions where not only entanglement, but also other non-linear properties of the density matrix come into play.

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.

We study the properties of a monitored ensemble of atoms driven by a laser field and in the presence of collective decay. The properties of the quantum trajectories describing the atomic cloud drastically depend on the monitoring protocol and are distinct from those of the average density matrix. By varying the strength of the external drive, a measurement-induced phase transition occurs separating two phases with entanglement entropy scaling sub-extensively with the system size. Incidentally, the critical point coincides with the superradiance transition of the trajectory-averaged dynamics. Our setup is implementable in current light-matter interaction devices, and most notably, the monitored dynamics is free from the post-selection measurement problem, even in the case of imperfect monitoring.

We show that two Yukawa-SYK models with a weak tunneling contact can have an exotic hybrid superconducting thermofield-double-like state that is holographically dual to a traversable wormhole connecting two black holes with charged scalar hair. The hybrid superconducting thermo-field-double/wormhole state is distinguishable by anomalous scaling of revival oscillations in the fermionic Green's function, but also in a unique Andreev-revival in the anomalous Green's function. The existence of this TFD/wormhole state surprisingly shows that the some quantum critical effects can survive the phase transition to superconductivity. This Andreev-revival is in principle an accessible signature of the transition to the TFD/wormhole phase detectable in the ac-Josephson current.

The photophysics and photochemistry associated with irradiating UV light in liquid water is central to numerous physical, chemical and biological processes. One of the key events involved in this process is the generation of the hydrated electron. Despite long study from both experimental and theoretical fronts, a unified understanding of the underlying mechanisms associated with the generation of the solvated electron have remained elusive. Here, using excited-state molecular dynamics simulations of condensed phase photoexcited liquid water, we unravel the key sequence of chemical events leading to the creation of the hydrated electron on the excited state. The process begins through the excitation of electrons localized mostly on specific topological defects in water's hydrogen network which is subsequently followed by two main reaction pathways. The first, leads to the creation of a hydrogen atom culminating in non-radiative decay back to the ground-state within 100 femtoseconds. The second involves a proton coupled electron transfer, giving rise to the formation of the hydronium ion, hydroxyl radical and the hydrated excess electron on the excited-state. This process is facilitated by ultrafast coupled rotational and translational motions of water molecules leading to the formation of water mediated ion-radical pairs in the network. These species can survive on the picosecond timescale and ultimately modulate the emission of visible photons. All in all, our findings provide fresh perspectives into the interpretation of several independent time-dependent spectroscopies measured over the last decades, paving the way for new directions on both theoretical and experimental fronts.

Measurement-induced phases exhibit unconventional dynamics as emergent collective phenomena, yet their behavior in tailored interacting systems -- crucial for quantum technologies -- remains less understood. We develop a systematic toolbox to analyze monitored dynamics in long-range interacting systems, relevant to platforms like trapped ions and Rydberg atoms. Our method extends spin-wave theory to general dynamical generators at the quantum trajectory level, enabling access to a broader class of states than approaches based on density matrices. This allows efficient simulation of large-scale interacting spins and captures nonlinear dynamical features such as entanglement and trajectory correlations. We showcase the versatility of our framework by exploring entanglement phase transitions in a monitored spin system with power-law interactions in one and two dimensions, where the entanglement scaling changes from logarithm to volume law as the interaction range shortens, and by dwelling on how our method mitigates experimental post-selection challenges in detecting monitored quantum phases.

We study the geometric phase accumulated during non-adiabatic charging of different driven open quantum systems serving as quantum battery models. We provide a full numerical analysis of dy- namics under different type of noises typically reported in superconducting circuits implementations. We complement the study with analytic results derived in the limiting case of no noise (i.e. isolated systems). We compute the non-unitary geometric phase acquired by the quantum batteries during the transition and show that there is a direct relation between the accumulated geometric phase and the integral of the stored energy during the transition. Finally, we perform the same analysis on a bipartite quantum battery that relies on a dephased charger and found similar results. Our theoretical findings are within experimental reach using state-of-the-art techniques.

Understanding different aspects of time is at the core of many areas in theoretical physics. Minimal models of continuous stochastic and quantum clocks have been proposed to explore fundamental limitations on the performance of timekeeping devices. Owing to the level of complexity in the clock structure and its energy consumption, such devices show trade-offs whose characterization remains an open challenge. Indeed, even conceptual designs for thermodynamically efficient quantum clocks are not yet well understood. In condensed matter theory, time-crystals were found as an exciting new phase of matter, featuring oscillations in (pseudo)-equilibrium with first experimental observations appearing recently. This naturally prompts the question: \textit{can time crystals be used as quantum clocks and what is their performance from a thermodynamic perspective?} We answer this question and find that quantum crystals are indeed genuine quantum clocks with a performance enhanced by the spontaneous breaking of time-translation symmetry.

We study the properties of a monitored ensemble of atoms driven by a laser field and in the presence of collective decay. The properties of the quantum trajectories describing the atomic cloud drastically depend on the monitoring protocol and are distinct from those of the average density matrix. By varying the strength of the external drive, a measurement-induced phase transition occurs separating two phases with entanglement entropy scaling sub-extensively with the system size. Incidentally, the critical point coincides with the superradiance transition of the trajectory-averaged dynamics. Our setup is implementable in current light-matter interaction devices, and most notably, the monitored dynamics is free from the post-selection measurement problem, even in the case of imperfect monitoring.

Biological systems sense and extract information from fluctuating signals while operating under energetic constraints and limited resolution. We introduce a general chemical model in which a sensor, coupled to a signaling pathway activated by hidden signals, can allosterically tune the production of a readout molecule. We propose viable strategies for the sensor to estimate, and eventually balance, information gathering on the hidden process and the associated dissipative cost relying solely on counting statistics of observed trajectories. We show that these strategies can be successfully implemented to adapt the readout production even with finite-time measurements and limited dynamic resolution, and remain effective in the presence of inhibitory regulatory mechanisms. Our study provides a plausible mechanism to actively balance information and dissipation, paving the way for an implementable design principle underpinning biological and biochemical adaptation.

We study monitored quantum dynamics of infinite-range interacting bosonic systems in the thermodynamic limit. We show that under semiclassical assumptions, the quantum fluctuations along single monitored trajectories adopt a deterministic limit for both quantum-jump and state-diffusion unravelings, and they can be exactly solved. In particular, the hierarchical structure of the equations of motion explains the coincidence of entanglement criticalities and dissipative phase transitions found in previous finite-size numerical studies. We illustrate the findings on a Bose-Hubbard dimer and a collective spin system.

We study many-body localization (MBL) transition in disordered Floquet systems using a polynomially filtered exact diagonalization (POLFED) algorithm. We focus on disordered kicked Ising model and quantitatively demonstrate that finite size effects at the MBL transition are less severe than in the random field XXZ spin chains widely studied in the context of MBL. Our conclusions extend also to other disordered Floquet models, indicating smaller finite size effects than those observed in the usually considered disordered autonomous spin chains. We observe consistent signatures of the transition to MBL phase for several indicators of ergodicity breaking in the kicked Ising model. Moreover, we show that an assumption of a power-law divergence of the correlation length at the MBL transition yields a critical exponent $\nu \approx 2$, consistent with the Harris criterion for 1D disordered systems.

We complete the derivation of the conservative dynamics of binary systems to fourth Post-Newtonian (4PN) order in the effective field theory (EFT) approach. We present a self-contained (ambiguity-free) computation of the renormalized Lagrangian, entirely within the confines of the PN expansion. While we confirm the final results reported in the literature, we clarify several issues regarding intermediate infrared (IR) and ultraviolet (UV) divergences, as well as the renormalization procedure. First, we properly identify the IR and UV singularities using (only) dimensional regularization and the method of regions, which are the pillars of the EFT formalism. This requires a careful study of scaleless integrals in the potential region, as well as conservative contributions from radiation modes due to tail effects. As expected by consistency, the UV divergences in the near region (due to the point-particle limit) can be absorbed into two counter-terms in the worldline effective theory. The counter-terms can then be removed by field redefinitions, such that the renormalization scheme-dependence has no physical effect to 4PN order. The remaining IR poles, which are spurious in nature, are unambiguously removed by implementing the zero-bin subtraction in the EFT approach. The procedure transforms the IR singularities into UV counter-parts. As anticipated, the left-over UV poles explicitly cancel out against UV divergences in conservative terms from radiation-reaction, uniquely determining the gravitational potential. Similar artificial IR/UV poles, which are intimately linked to the split into regions, are manifest at lower orders. Starting at 4PN, both local- and nonlocal-in-time contributions from the radiation region enter in the conservative dynamics. Neither additional regulators nor ambiguity-parameters are introduced at any stage of the computations.

Dark matter haloes form from the collapse of matter around special positions in the initial field, those where the local matter flows converge to a point. For such a triaxial collapse to take place, the energy shear tensor -- the source of the evolution of the inertia tensor -- must be positive definite. It has been shown that this is indeed the case for the energy shear tensor of the vast majority of protohaloes. At generic positions in a Gaussian random field, the trace and traceless parts of the tensor are independent of one another. Here we show that, on the contrary, in positive definite matrices they correlate strongly, and these correlations are very similar to those exhibited by protohaloes. Moreover, while positive-definiteness ensures that an object will collapse, it does not specify when. Previous work has shown that the trace of the energy tensor -- the energy overdensity -- exhibits significant scatter in its values, but must lie above a critical `threshold' value for the halo to collapse by today. We show that suitable combinations of the eigenvalues of the traceless part are able to explain a substantial part of the scatter of the trace. These variables provide an efficient way to parameterise the initial value of the energy overdensity, allowing us to formulate an educated guess for the threshold of collapse. We validate our ansatz by measuring the distribution of several secondary properties of protohaloes, finding good agreement with our analytical predictions.