Strong-to-Weak Spontaneous Symmetry Breaking in Mixed Quantum States
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
Symmetry in mixed quantum states can manifest in two distinct forms: , where each individual pure state in the quantum ensemble is symmetric with the same charge, and , which applies only to the entire ensemble. This paper explores a novel type of spontaneous symmetry breaking (SSB) where a strong symmetry is broken to a weak one. While the SSB of a weak symmetry is measured by the long-ranged two-point correlation function, the strong-to-weak SSB (SWSSB) is measured by the . We prove that SWSSB is a universal property of mixed-state quantum phases, in the sense that the phenomenon of SWSSB is robust against symmetric low-depth local quantum channels. We also show that the symmetry breaking is “spontaneous” in the sense that the effect of a local symmetry-breaking measurement cannot be recovered locally. We argue that a thermal state at a nonzero temperature in the canonical ensemble (with fixed symmetry charge) should have spontaneously broken strong symmetry. Additionally, we study nonthermal scenarios where decoherence induces SWSSB, leading to phase transitions described by classical statistical models with bond randomness. In particular, the SWSSB transition of a decohered Ising model can be viewed as the “ungauged” version of the celebrated toric-code decodability transition. We confirm that, in the decohered Ising model, the SWSSB transition defined by the fidelity correlator is the only physical transition in terms of channel recoverability. We also comment on other (inequivalent) definitions of SWSSB, through correlation functions with higher Rényi indices.
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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 | 0.001 |
| 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 it