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On the integrability structure of the deformed rule-54 reversible cellular automaton

Mathematical Physics 2026-04-01 v2 Statistical Mechanics High Energy Physics - Theory math.MP Exactly Solvable and Integrable Systems Quantum Physics

Abstract

We study quantum and stochastic deformations of the rule-54 reversible cellular automaton (RCA54) on a 1+1-dimensional spatiotemporal lattice, focusing on their integrability structures in two distinct settings. First, for the quantum deformation, which turns the model into an interaction-round-a-face brickwork quantum circuit (either on an infinite lattice or with periodic boundary conditions), we show that the shortest-range nontrivial conserved charge commuting with the discrete-time evolution operator has a density supported on six consecutive sites. By constructing the corresponding range-6 Lax operator, we prove that this charge belongs to an infinite tower of mutually commuting conserved charges generated by higher-order logarithmic derivatives of the transfer matrix. With the aid of an intertwining operator, we further prove that the transfer matrix commutes with the discrete-time evolution operator. Second, for the stochastic deformation, which renders the model into a Markov-chain circuit, we investigate open boundary conditions that couple the system at its edges to stochastic reservoirs. In this setting, we explicitly construct the non-equilibrium steady state (NESS) by means of a staggered patch matrix ansatz, a hybrid construction combining the previously used commutative patch-state ansatz for the undeformed RCA54 with the matrix-product ansatz. Finally, we propose a simple empirical criterion for detecting integrability or exact solvability in a given model setup, introducing the notion of digit complexity.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2603.25424,
  title  = {On the integrability structure of the deformed rule-54 reversible cellular automaton},
  author = {Chiara Paletta and Tomaž Prosen},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2603.25424},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

Mathematica notebooks related to this paper are available on Zenodo: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.19170399