Fermionic mean-field dynamics for spin systems beyond free fermions

Condensed Matter > Strongly Correlated Electrons [Submitted on 2 Apr 2026] Fermionic mean-field dynamics for spin systems beyond free fermions Rishab Dutta, Marc Illa, Niranjan Govind, Karol Kowalski We introduce the fermionized time-dependent Hartree-Fock (fTDHF), a real-time quantum dynamics method for spin-1/2 Hamiltonians following their mapping to fermions via the Jordan-Wigner transformation. fTDHF is formally equivalent to exact dynamics in the case of free fermions and can efficiently handle non-local string operators arising from long-range interactions via transition matrix elements between non-orthogonal Slater determinants. We show that the fTDHF method can be implemented on a classical computer with a cost that scales polynomially with system size, and linearly with the time steps. We benchmark fTDHF against exact dynamics on three separate spin-1/2 models, representing adiabatic preparation of states with long-range correlations, disorder-driven observation of many-body localization, and particle production in the Schwinger model. For each of these systems, fTDHF is shown to reproduce the qualitative dynamics generated by the exact evolutions, while maintaining a simple physical picture due to its mean-field nature. Comments: 13 pages including references, 4 figures Subjects: Strongly Correlated Electrons (cond-mat.str-el); Quantum Physics (quant-ph) Cite as: arXiv:2604.02584 [cond-mat.str-el]   (or arXiv:2604.02584v1 [cond-mat.str-el] for this version)   https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2604.02584 Focus to learn more Submission history From: Rishab Dutta [view email] [v1] Thu, 2 Apr 2026 23:41:06 UTC (738 KB) Access Paper: HTML (experimental) view license Current browse context: cond-mat.str-el < prev   |   next > new | recent | 2026-04 Change to browse by: cond-mat quant-ph References & Citations INSPIRE HEP NASA ADS Google Scholar Semantic Scholar Export BibTeX Citation Bookmark Bibliographic Tools Bibliographic and Citation Tools Bibliographic Explorer Toggle Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?) Connected Papers Toggle Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?) Litmaps Toggle Litmaps (What is Litmaps?) scite.ai Toggle scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?) Code, Data, Media Demos Related Papers About arXivLabs Which authors of this paper are endorsers? | Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)