English

Finite Quantum Histories: Holonomy Spectra, Minimal Clocks, and Exact Clock-Change Covariance

Quantum Physics 2026-08-06 v1 General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology Mathematical Physics

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 M=UL1U0M=U_{L-1}\cdots U_0. Its spectrum is λa,k=1cos((2πkθa)/L)\lambda_{a,k}=1-\cos((2\pi k-\theta_a)/L), where eiθaspec(M)e^{i\theta_a}\in\mathrm{spec}(M). Thus the exact history sector is isomorphic to Fix(M)\mathrm{Fix}(M), 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 UU, the minimal number of clock events is the projective order of UU. We distinguish the normalizer of the clock algebra from transformations preserving the coherent history code and classify oriented exact sharp clock changes by U(r)×ZLU(r)\times\mathbb{Z}_L on a rank-rr 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