Finite Quantum Histories: Holonomy Spectra, Minimal Clocks, and Exact Clock-Change Covariance
Abstract
We solve cyclic finite-dimensional quantum histories for arbitrary time-dependent unitary steps, without assuming that one step has finite order. The propagation Hamiltonian is a unitary connection Laplacian on a cycle; its complete gauge invariant is the monodromy . Its spectrum is , where . Thus the exact history sector is isomorphic to , while frustration, the gap above a nonempty zero-energy sector, the determinant, and the finite-temperature trace are obtained in closed form. Ordinary spectral data recover the multiset of monodromy phase cosines but not phase orientation; low energy certifies proximity to an exact relational history. We then define the predictive quotient of a sharp finite clock relative to an accessible operator system as the unique coarsest event alphabet preserving all conditional statistics on a history sector. A finite-error theorem shows that threshold clustering recovers this quotient when the minimum diamond separation of inequivalent event channels exceeds four times the estimation error, and proves an optimal record-count bound. With full matrix access and homogeneous step , the minimal number of clock events is the projective order of . We distinguish the normalizer of the clock algebra from transformations preserving the coherent history code and classify oriented exact sharp clock changes by on a rank- history sector; without orientation the cyclic factor becomes dihedral. Reversible changes of full-information clock fibers are necessarily unitary, so irreversible coarse-graining is not exact clock covariance. Minimal realizations of a complete history Gram kernel are uniquely unitarily equivalent, with a finite-data Procrustes bound. Independent finite-matrix code verifies the main results.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2608.05748,
title = {Finite Quantum Histories: Holonomy Spectra, Minimal Clocks, and Exact Clock-Change Covariance},
author = {Maxim V. Churilov},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2608.05748},
year = {2026}
}
Comments
10 pages, 1 figure; independent finite-matrix verification code included