Benford's Law Detects Quantum Phase Transitions similarly as Earthquakes

A century ago, it was predicted that the first significant digit appearing in a data would be nonuniformly distributed, with the number one appearing with the highest frequency. This law goes by the name of Benford's law. It holds for data ranging from infectious disease cases to national greenhouse gas emissions. Quantum phase transitions are cooperative phenomena where qualitative changes occur in many-body systems at zero temperature. We show that the century-old Benford's law can detect quantum phase transitions, much like it detects earthquakes. Therefore, being certainly of very different physical origins, seismic activity and quantum cooperative phenomena may be detected by similar methods. The result has immediate implications in precise measurements in experiments in general, and for realizable quantum computers in particular. It shows that estimation of the first significant digit of measured physical observables is enough to detect the presence of quantum phase transitions in macroscopic systems.Comment: v1: 3 pages, 2 figures; v2: 6 (+epsilon) epl pages, 5 figures, significant additions, previous results unchange

Disorder-induced Effects in Noisy Dynamics of Bose-Hubbard and Fermi-Hubbard Quantum Glasses

We address the effects of quenched disorder averaging in the time-evolution of systems of ultracold atoms in optical lattices in the presence of noise, imposed by of an environment. For bosonic systems governed by the Bose-Hubbard Hamiltonian, we quantify the response of disorder in Hamiltonian parameters in terms of physical observables, including bipartite entanglement in the ground state and report the existence of disorder-induced enhancement in weakly interacting cases. For systems of two-species fermions described by the Fermi-Hubbard Hamiltonian, we find similar results. In both cases, our dynamical calculations show no appreciable change in the effects of disorder from that of the initial state of the evolution. We explain our findings in terms the statistics of the disorder in the parameters and the behaviour of the observables with the parameters