Temporal Coarse-Graining as the Origin of Macroscopic Friction in Quantum Spin Chains via Data-Driven Liouvillian Extraction

Abstract:Understanding how macroscopic irreversible hydrodynamics emerges from the reversible unitary dynamics of isolated quantum many-body systems remains a central challenge. Conventional approaches force spin density dynamics into purely diffusive models, obscuring the interplay of pressure, spin current, and local friction, and leave open the role of the observer's temporal resolution. We introduce a fully data-driven framework based on generalized Extended Dynamic Mode Decomposition (gEDMD) integrated with the Mori-Zwanzig projection. By expanding the observable dictionary to include spin currents, we extract the Navier-Stokes hydrodynamic coefficients from a chaotic XXZ spin chain across temporal coarse-graining scales. Our unconstrained extraction reveals a dichotomy: the mechanical elasticity ($c^2$) derives from the exact unitary dynamics, preserving microscopic reversibility, whereas the macroscopic friction ($\gamma$) and kinematic viscosity ($\nu$) show zero net dissipation, oscillating rapidly around zero in the exact-derivative limit. Genuine macroscopic transport therefore requires finite temporal coarse-graining: at a finite observation timescale ($\Delta t_{cg} > 0$) the system passes through a crossover where these fluctuations average out, establishing an intermediate functional regime with strictly positive friction and viscosity. We further show that the coarse-grained generator is a predictive reduced model requiring only $O(N)$ macroscopic observables, and that the sign of the emergent friction is inherited from the causal, forward-in-time direction of the inference: time-symmetric estimators yield zero net dissipation at any coarse-graining scale. Macroscopic friction in isolated quantum systems is thus not an absolute property but an emergent phenomenon dictated by the temporal resolution and causal direction of the observer's description.

Quantum Physics (quant-ph); Statistical Mechanics (cond-mat.stat-mech)

arXiv:2605.05604 [quant-ph]

(or arXiv:2605.05604v2 [quant-ph] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2605.05604 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite

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