Harnessing quantum dynamics exploiting stochastic resetting

Stochastic resetting is an ubiquitous phenomenon in nature. This models, e.g., animals foraging for food in the wilderness, where the agent goes back to its past location, where food was successfully located, at random times. In the first part of the talk, I will give a broad introduction about these examples borrowed from classical physics. I will consider the paradigmatic case of the Brownian motion, where stochastic resetting has been shown: 1) to generate a non-equilibrium steady state; 2) to speed up the search process by minimizing the time needed to locate the target. In contrast to this, much less is known about the effect of quantum resetting on quantum dynamics. In the second part of the talk, I will address this problem by presenting two paradigmatic applications. First, I will show that unitary many-body quantum dynamics interspersed with stochastic resets shows collective behavior akin to phase transitions when the reset state is chosen conditionally on the outcome of a global measurement. Second, I will show that applying stochastic resetting for a transient time to quantum dissipative dynamics leads to a significant, sometimes even exponential, speedup in the relaxation dynamics towards the stationary state. Overall, these results show that stochastic resetting might provide a simple and robust method to design collective nonequilibrium states and accelerated state-prepartion protocols for quantum many-body systems.