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Anomalous waiting-time distributions in postselection-free quantum many-body dynamics under continuous monitoring

Statistical Mechanics 2026-04-02 v1 Quantum Gases Quantum Physics

Abstract

We investigate waiting-time distributions (WTDs) of quantum jumps in continuously monitored quantum many-body systems, whose unconditional dynamics lead to the trivial infinite-temperature state. We demonstrate that the WTD of a half-chain subsystem exhibits an anomalous tail, markedly deviating from the Poissonian distribution in stark contrast to that of the whole system. By analyzing the spectral properties of the superoperator L0\mathscr L_0, which is defined by removing the jump terms associated with the half-chain subsystem from the full Liouvillian, we find that the long-time behavior with the anomalous tail of the half-chain WTD is governed by the eigenvalue λ0(<0)\lambda_0\:(<0) with the largest real part. We further reveal a qualitative change in the system-size dependence of λ0\lambda_0 as a function of the measurement strength: for sufficiently weak measurement, λ0\lambda_0 decreases proportionally to the system size, while for strong measurement, λ0\lambda_0 scales independently of the system size, signaling the persistence of the anomalous half-chain WTD in the thermodynamic limit. The WTD is extracted solely from the spacetime record of quantum jumps {ti,xi}\{t_i,x_i\} and can be experimentally accessed without postselection. Our work establishes a spectral framework for understanding nontrivial WTDs in subsystems of monitored quantum dynamics and provides a novel diagnostics to assess many-body effects on WTDs.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2604.00358,
  title  = {Anomalous waiting-time distributions in postselection-free quantum many-body dynamics under continuous monitoring},
  author = {Kazuki Yamamoto and Ryusuke Hamazaki},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2604.00358},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

18 pages, submitted to "Focus on Non-Hermitian Quantum Many-Body Physics" in Quantum Science and Technology