English

Boundary Perturbation Effects in Quantum Systems with Conserved Energy and Continuous Symmetry

Quantum Physics 2026-03-17 v2 Statistical Mechanics

Abstract

We investigate one-dimensional systems with both energy conservation and a continuous symmetry, focusing on the impact of a boundary perturbation that breaks the continuous symmetry. Our study reveals two distinct dynamical phases: one in which the corresponding charge exhibits extensive fluctuations, and another where the charge remains conserved. These phases appear in both free and interacting models. We interpret this behavior through a boundary-induced pumping mechanism, which estimates the amplitude connecting two degenerate states from different charge sectors via a local charge-non-conserving operator. In the Floquet setting, we show that the frozen phase can survive at high driving frequencies but vanishes at low frequencies. This phenomenon is exact in free-fermion systems in the thermodynamic limit, but in interacting systems it appears only at finite system size. The emergence of the charge-frozen phase is attributed to effective energy conservation, and we demonstrate that this phase disappears when effective energy conservation is broken or replaced by other symmetries.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2502.16252,
  title  = {Boundary Perturbation Effects in Quantum Systems with Conserved Energy and Continuous Symmetry},
  author = {Qucheng Gao and Xiao Chen},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2502.16252},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

22 pages, 14 figures