English

Local diagnostics for strong-to-weak spontaneous symmetry breaking and non-equilibrium phase transitions

Quantum Physics 2026-05-29 v1 Statistical Mechanics Strongly Correlated Electrons

Abstract

We construct strongly Z2\mathbb{Z}_2-symmetric local Markov/Lindblad dynamics exhibiting transitions between strong-paramagnetic behavior and strong-to-weak spontaneous symmetry breaking. In 1+1d, an absorbing-state construction gives a transition with scaling consistent with the parity-conserving branching-annihilating random-walk universality class. In 2+1d, a pair-flip variant of Toom's rule provides evidence for a stable strong-paramagnetic/weakly symmetry-broken regime and a transition into an active SWSSB regime. We also introduce a marginal fidelity correlator of radius RR, a local proxy for the usual SWSSB fidelity order parameter requiring tomography only on O(Rd)\mathcal{O}(R^d)-size regions. For broad classes of states, including symmetry-projected Gibbs-like states satisfying suitable local indistinguishability assumptions, we bound the error between the marginal and global fidelity correlators by terms decaying exponentially in RR. These marginal fidelities provide a model-independent diagnostic of SWSSB in absorbing-state transitions, where microscopic notions of defects or activity are not universal.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2605.29113,
  title  = {Local diagnostics for strong-to-weak spontaneous symmetry breaking and non-equilibrium phase transitions},
  author = {Carolyn Zhang},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2605.29113},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

5.5 pages with 3 figures in the main text, 10 pages of supplemental material including 3 figures