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"id": "contactperson", "title": { "de": "Kontaktperson", "en": "Contact person" } } } ], "dates": [ { "date": "2025-09-12", "type": { "id": "created", "title": { "de": "Erstellt", "en": "Created" } } } ], "description": "

Many-Body Localized (MBL) systems present a unique paradigm for the arrow of time, distinct
from the standard thermodynamic arrow that arises in chaotic, thermalizing systems. The conven-
tional framework grounds irreversibility in the computational intractability (QMA-completeness) of
reversing a physical process, a hardness that emerges from the scrambling of quantum information.
MBL systems, by failing to scramble and thermalize, serve as a critical test of this thesis. This paper
formalizes the ”Integrable Arrow of Time” characteristic of MBL systems. We demonstrate that,
due to the emergence of quasi-local integrals of motion (l-bits), the evolution of an MBL system is
computationally reversible in principle; the problem of inferring the initial state is tractable for an
ideal quantum computer (in BQP). However, we then prove that for any realistic, resource-bounded
observer, this computational reversibility is physically inaccessible. The profound stability of the
l-bit structure provides a robust, local memory that enforces a unidirectional flow of time. This
work establishes that physical irreversibility does not strictly require computational intractability,
revealing a spectrum of computational arrows of time, from the QMA-hard thermodynamic limit to
the BQP-tractable integrable limit.

", "languages": [ { "id": "eng", "title": { "en": "English" } } ], "publication_date": "2025-09-13", "publisher": "Zenodo", "resource_type": { "id": "publication-preprint", "title": { "de": "Preprint", "en": "Preprint" } }, "rights": [ { "description": { "en": "The Creative Commons Attribution license allows re-distribution and re-use of a licensed work on the condition that the creator is appropriately credited." }, "icon": "cc-by-icon", "id": "cc-by-4.0", "props": { "scheme": "spdx", "url": "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode" }, "title": { "en": "Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International" } } ], "subjects": [ { "subject": "Arrow of time" }, { "subject": "Computational reversibility" }, { "subject": "Physical irreversibility" }, { "subject": "Many-body localized systems" }, { "subject": "Many-body localization (MBL)" }, { "subject": "Quantum information" }, { "subject": "Entanglement dynamics" }, { "subject": "Eigenstate thermalization hypothesis (ETH)" }, { "subject": "Quasi-local integrals of motion" }, { "subject": "l-bits" }, { "subject": "Quantum complexity" }, { "subject": "Quantum semantic inference problem (QSIP)" }, { "subject": "BQP complexity class" }, { "subject": "QMA-complete problems" }, { "subject": "Integrable systems" }, { "subject": "Disorder in quantum systems" }, { "subject": "Quantum thermodynamics" }, { "subject": "Entropy and information theory" }, { "subject": "Coarse-graining" }, { "subject": "Resource-bounded observers" } ], "title": "The Integrable Arrow of Time: Computational Reversibility and Physical Irreversibility in Many-Body Localized Systems", "version": "v1" }, "parent": { "access": { "owned_by": { "user": "1295846" }, "settings": { "accept_conditions_text": null, "allow_guest_requests": false, "allow_user_requests": false, "secret_link_expiration": 0 } }, "communities": {}, "id": "17109920", "pids": { "doi": { "client": "datacite", "identifier": "10.5281/zenodo.17109920", "provider": "datacite" } } }, "pids": { "doi": { "client": "datacite", "identifier": "10.5281/zenodo.17109921", "provider": "datacite" }, "oai": { "identifier": "oai:zenodo.org:17109921", "provider": "oai" } }, "revision_id": 3, "stats": { "all_versions": { "data_volume": 3090217.0, "downloads": 13, "unique_downloads": 10, "unique_views": 10, "views": 11 }, "this_version": { "data_volume": 3090217.0, "downloads": 13, "unique_downloads": 10, "unique_views": 10, "views": 11 } }, "status": "published", "swh": {}, "updated": "2025-09-13T01:53:13.594242+00:00", "versions": { "index": 1, "is_latest": true } }