Dynamical phase transitions, caustics, and quantum dark bands
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract We provide a new perspective on quantum dynamical phase transitions (DPTs) by explaining their origin in terms of caustics that form in the Fock space representation of the many-body state over time, using the fully connected transverse field Ising model as an example. In this way we establish a connection between DPTs in a quantum spin system and an everyday natural phenomenon: The dark band between the primary and secondary bows (caustics) in rainbows known as Alexander’s dark band. The DPT occurs when the Loschmidt echo crosses the switching line between the evanescent tails of two back-to-back Airy functions that dress neighbouring fold caustics in Fock space and is the time-dependent analogue of what is seen as a function of angle in the sky. The structural stability and universal properties of caustics, as described mathematically by catastrophe theory, explains the generic occurrence of DPTs in the model and suggests that our analysis has wide applicability. Based on our thorough analytical understanding we propose a protocol which can be used to verify the existence of a DPT in a finite system experiment.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".