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Search indexed NASA NTRS and DOE OSTI research on propulsion, heat transfer, battery materials and energy systems. Follow report and document links to the original sources.

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At least 649 records · Page 36
All sourcesNASA NTRSDOE OSTI
DOE OSTI2015

Methane and carbon dioxide emissions from 40 lakes along a north–south latitudinal transect in Alaska

Uncertainties in the magnitude and seasonality of various gas emission modes, particularly among different lake types, limit our ability to estimate methane (CH 4 ) and carbon dioxide (CO 2 ) emissions from northern lakes. Here we assessed the relationship between CH 4 and CO 2 emission modes in 40 lakes along a latitudinal transect in Alaska to lakes' physicochemical properties and geographic characteristics, including permafrost soil type surrounding lakes. Emission modes included direct ebullition, diffusion, storage flux, and a newly identified ice-bubble storage (IBS) flux. We found that all lakes were net sources of atmospheric CH 4 and CO 2 , but the climate warming impact of lake CH 4 emissions was 2 times higher than that of CO 2 . Ebullition and diffusion were the dominant modes of CH 4 and CO 2 emissions, respectively. IBS, ~10% of total annual CH 4 emissions, is the release to the atmosphere of seasonally ice-trapped bubbles when lake ice confining bubbles begins to melt in spring. IBS, which has not been explicitly accounted for in regional studies, increased the estimate of springtime emissions from our study lakes by 320%. Geographically, CH 4 emissions from stratified, mixotrophic interior Alaska thermokarst (thaw) lakes formed in icy, organic-rich yedoma permafrost soils were 6-fold higher than from non-yedoma lakes throughout the rest of Alaska. The relationship between CO 2 emissions and geographic parameters was weak, suggesting high variability among sources and sinks that regulate CO 2 emissions (e.g., catchment waters, pH equilibrium). Total CH 4 emission was correlated with concentrations of soluble reactive phosphorus and total nitrogen in lake water, Secchi depth, and lake area, with yedoma lakes having higher nutrient concentrations, shallower Secchi depth, and smaller lake areas. Our findings suggest that permafrost type plays important roles in determining CH 4 emissions from lakes by both supplying organic matter to methanogenesis directly from thawing permafrost and by enhancing nutrient availability to primary production, which can also fuel decomposition and methanogenesis.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗
DOE OSTI2021

CTRAMER: An open-source software package for correlating interfacial charge transfer rate constants with donor/acceptor geometries in organic photovoltaic materials

In this paper, we present CTRAMER (Charge-Transfer RAtes from Molecular dynamics, Electronic structure, and Rate theory)—an opensource software package for calculating interfacial charge-transfer (CT) rate constants in organic photovoltaic (OPV) materials based on ab initio calculations and molecular dynamics simulations. The software is based on identifying representative donor/acceptor geometries within interfacial structures obtained from molecular dynamics simulation of donor/acceptor blends and calculating the corresponding Fermi’s golden rule CT rate constants within the framework of the linearized-semiclassical approximation. While the methods used are well established, the integration of these state-of-the-art tools originating from different disciplines to study photoinduced CT processes with explicit treatment of the environment, in our opinion, makes this package unique and innovative. The software also provides tools for investigating other observables of interest. After outlining the features and implementation details, the usage and performance of the software are demonstrated with results from an example OPV system.

37 INORGANIC, ORGANIC, PHYSICAL, AND ANALYTICAL CH↗
DOE OSTI2012

TWO-COMPONENT STRUCTURE OF THE H{beta} BROAD-LINE REGION IN QUASARS. I. EVIDENCE FROM SPECTRAL PRINCIPAL COMPONENT ANALYSIS

We report on a spectral principal component analysis (SPCA) of a sample of 816 quasars, selected to have small Fe II velocity shifts with spectral coverage in the rest wavelength range 3500-5500 A. The sample is explicitly designed to mitigate spurious effects on SPCA induced by Fe II velocity shifts. We improve the algorithm of SPCA in the literature and introduce a new quantity, the fractional-contribution spectrum, that effectively identifies the emission features encoded in each eigenspectrum. The first eigenspectrum clearly records the power-law continuum and very broad Balmer emission lines. Narrow emission lines dominate the second eigenspectrum. The third eigenspectrum represents the Fe II emission and a component of the Balmer lines with kinematically similar intermediate-velocity widths. Correlations between the weights of the eigenspectra and parametric measurements of line strength and continuum slope confirm the above interpretation for the eigenspectra. Monte Carlo simulations demonstrate the validity of our method to recognize cross talk in SPCA and firmly rule out a single-component model for broad H{beta}. We also present the results of SPCA for four other samples that contain quasars in bins of larger Fe II velocity shift; similar eigenspectra are obtained. We propose that the H{beta}-emitting region has two kinematically distinct components: one with very large velocities whose strength correlates with the continuum shape and another with more modest, intermediate velocities that is closely coupled to the gas that gives rise to Fe II emission.

79 ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS↗
DOE OSTI2021

Improved first-principles equation-of-state table of deuterium for high-energy-density applications

Here, we present a first-principles equation-of-state (EOS) table of deuterium aimed at improving the previously established first-principles equation-of-state table (FPEOS). The EOS table presented here, referred to as iFPEOS, introduces (1) a universal density functional theory (DFT) treatment of all density and temperature conditions, (2) a fully consistent treatment of exchange-correlation (XC) thermal effects across the entire range of temperatures covered, and (3) quantum treatment of ions. Based on ab initio molecular dynamics driven by thermal density functional theory, iFPEOS includes density points in the range 1×10 –3 $\leqslant$ ρ $\leqslant$ 1.6×10 3 g/cm 3 and temperature points in the range 800 K $\leqslant$ T $\leqslant$ 256 MK, thus covering the challenging warm dense matter (WDM) regime. For an improved description of the electronic structure, iFPEOS employs an advanced free-energy XC density functional with explicit temperature dependence, which is at the metageneralized gradient approximation level of DFT. We use the latest orbital-free free-energy density functional for the high-temperature regime where it shows excellent agreement with standard Mermin-Kohn-Sham DFT. For quantum treatment of ions we use path-integral molecular dynamics in order to take into account nuclear quantum effects. Results are compared to other EOS models and most recent experimental measurements of deuterium properties such as the molecular-toatomic fluid transition, the principal and reshock Hugoniot, and sound speed. We find that iFPEOS provides an improved agreement with experimental data compared to other first-principles EOS models in the WDM regime for pressures up to 200 GPa and temperatures up to 60 000 K. For higher pressures and temperatures, however, iFPEOS is in agreement with other models in predicting lower compressibility and higher sound speed along the Hugoniot, compared to experiment.

75 CONDENSED MATTER PHYSICS, SUPERCONDUCTIVITY AND↗
DOE OSTI2021

Orientational Ordering within Semiconducting Polymer Fibrils

Abstract Due to a general paucity of suitable characterization methods, the internal orientational ordering of polymer fibrils has rarely been measured despite its importance particularly for semi‐conducting polymers. An emerging tool with sensitivity to bond orientation is polarized resonant soft X‐ray scattering (P‐RSoXS). Here, P‐RSoXS reveals the molecular arrangement within fibrils (if type I or type II fibrils), the extent of orientation in the fibril crystal, and an explicit crystal‐amorphous interphase. Neat films as well as binary blends with a fullerene derivative are characterized for three different polymers, that are prototypical materials widely used in organic electronics applications. Anisotropic P‐RSoXS patterns reveal two different fibril types. Analysis of the q ‐dependence of the anisotropy from simulated and experimental scattering patterns reveal that neat polymer fibrillar systems likely comprise more than two phases, with the third phase in addition to crystal and amorphous likely being an interphase with distinct density and orientation. Intriguingly, the fibril type correlates to the H‐ or J‐aggregation signature in ultraviolet‐visible (UV–vis) spectroscopy, revealing insight into the fibril formation. Together, the results will open the door to develop more sophisticated structure‐function relationships between chemical design, fibril type, formation pathways and kinetics, interfacial ordering, and eventually device functions.

Mukherjee, Subhrangsu↗
DOE OSTI2021

Differential effects of redox conditions on the decomposition of litter and soil organic matter

Soil redox conditions exert substantial influence on biogeochemical processes in terrestrial ecosystems. Humid tropical forests are often characterized by fluctuating redox dynamics, yet how redox fluctuations affect patterns in soil versus litter decomposition and associated CO2 fluxes are not well understood in these ecosystems. We used a 13C-labeled litter addition to explicitly follow the decomposition of litter-derived vs. native soil-derived organic matter in response to four different soil redox regimes—static oxic or anoxic, and two oscillating treatments—in soil from the Luquillo Experimental Forest, Puerto Rico. We coupled this incubation experiment with high-resolution mass spectrometry analysis to characterize the preferential decomposition of specific classes of organic molecules. CO2 production from litter and soil organic matter (SOM) showed distinctly different responses to redox manipulation. The cumulative production of SOM-derived CO2 was positively correlated with the length of soil exposure to an oxic headspace (r = 0.89, n = 20), whereas cumulative 13C-litter-derived CO2 production was not linked to oxygen availability. The CO2 production rate from litter was highest under static anoxic conditions in the first half of the incubation period, and later dropped to the lowest among all redox treatments. In the consistently anoxic soils, we observed the depletion of more oxidized water-extractable organic matter (especially amino sugars, carbohydrates, and proteins) over time, suggesting that under anaerobic conditions, microbes preferentially used more oxidized litter-derived compounds during the early stages of decomposition. Results from kinetic modeling showed that more frequent anoxic exposure limited the decomposition of a slow-cycling C pool, but not a fast-cycling pool. Overall, our results demonstrate that substrate source—freshly added litter vs. native organic matter—plays an important role in the redox sensitivity of organic matter decomposition. In soil environments that regularly experience redox fluctuations, anaerobic heterotrophs can be surprisingly effective in degrading fresh plant litter.

37 INORGANIC, ORGANIC, PHYSICAL, AND ANALYTICAL CH↗
DOE OSTI2019

Experimental Validation of an Additively Manufactured Stiffness-Optimized Short-Fiber Reinforced Composite Clevis Joint

This effort describes experiments for the validation of the response of an additively manufactured stiffness-optimized short-fiber reinforced composite. A Direct Ink Write (DIW) method is used to additively manufacture a clevis joint plate which was designed such that its compliance would be minimized (i.e., stiffness maximized) for far-field axial loading. A unique aspect of the optimization scheme is that it accounts for manufacturing constraints, such as tool turn radius and tool path spacing. Along with the optimized clevis joint plate, additively manufactured 0°–90° and ± 45° composite plates of the same number of layers, as well as a control 0°–90° sample of resin only, were also studied. In addition to far-field load-displacement, near-field strain was monitored using digital image correlation (DIC). The results showed that the optimized plate did indeed exhibit the largest stiffness, based on far-field measurements. DIC-measured strains showed that locally the axial strain component, which is the largest, was also minimized for the optimized specimen, although the other strain components followed different trends. Furthermore, in the experiments it was seen that the optimized design exhibited a nonlinear/hysteretic behavior which is believed to be a consequence of its internal gap/cell structure. This internal structure, which results by optimized placement of material, although explicitly not accounted for in the optimization, may affect global response. Lastly, although not a part of the optimization study itself, the failure load for the optimized joint plate was also seen to be the largest of all the cases studied.

42 ENGINEERING↗
DOE OSTI2024

Lyapunov exponent as a signature of dissipative many-body quantum chaos

A distinct feature of Hermitian quantum chaotic dynamics is the exponential increase of certain out-of-time-order correlation (OTOC) functions around the Ehrenfest time with a rate given by a Lyapunov exponent. Physically, the OTOCs describe the growth of quantum uncertainty that crucially depends on the nature of the quantum motion. Here, we employ the OTOC in order to provide a precise definition of dissipative quantum chaos. For this purpose, we compute analytically the Lyapunov exponent for the vectorized formulation of the large- q limit of a q -body Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev model coupled to a Markovian bath. These analytic results are confirmed by an explicit numerical calculation of the Lyapunov exponent for several values of q ≥ 4 based on the solutions of the Schwinger-Dyson and Bethe-Salpeter equations. We show that the Lyapunov exponent decreases monotonically as the coupling to the bath increases and eventually becomes negative at a critical value of the coupling signaling a transition to a dynamics which is no longer quantum chaotic. Therefore, a positive Lyapunov exponent is a defining feature of dissipative many-body quantum chaos. The observation of the breaking of the exponential growth for sufficiently strong coupling suggests that dissipative quantum chaos may require in certain cases a sufficiently weak coupling to the environment. Published by the American Physical Society 2024

García-García, Antonio M.↗
DOE OSTI2017

Coupled land surface–subsurface hydrogeophysical inverse modeling to estimate soil organic carbon content and explore associated hydrological and thermal dynamics in the Arctic tundra

Quantitative characterization of soil organic carbon (OC) content is essential due to its significant impacts on surface–subsurface hydrological–thermal processes and microbial decomposition of OC, which both in turn are important for predicting carbon–climate feedbacks. While such quantification is particularly important in the vulnerable organic-rich Arctic region, it is challenging to achieve due to the general limitations of conventional core sampling and analysis methods, and to the extremely dynamic nature of hydrological–thermal processes associated with annual freeze–thaw events. In this study, we develop and test an inversion scheme that can flexibly use single or multiple datasets – including soil liquid water content, temperature and electrical resistivity tomography (ERT) data – to estimate the vertical distribution of OC content. Our approach relies on the fact that OC content strongly influences soil hydrological–thermal parameters and, therefore, indirectly controls the spatiotemporal dynamics of soil liquid water content, temperature and their correlated electrical resistivity. We employ the Community Land Model to simulate nonisothermal surface–subsurface hydrological dynamics from the bedrock to the top of canopy, with consideration of land surface processes (e.g., solar radiation balance, evapotranspiration, snow accumulation and melting) and ice–liquid water phase transitions. For inversion, we combine a deterministic and an adaptive Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) optimization algorithm to estimate a posteriori distributions of desired model parameters. For hydrological–thermal-to-geophysical variable transformation, the simulated subsurface temperature, liquid water content and ice content are explicitly linked to soil electrical resistivity via petrophysical and geophysical models. We validate the developed scheme using different numerical experiments and evaluate the influence of measurement errors and benefit of joint inversion on the estimation of OC and other parameters. We also quantify the propagation of uncertainty from the estimated parameters to prediction of hydrological–thermal responses. We find that, compared to inversion of single dataset (temperature, liquid water content or apparent resistivity), joint inversion of these datasets significantly reduces parameter uncertainty. We find that the joint inversion approach is able to estimate OC and sand content within the shallow active layer (top 0.3 m of soil) with high reliability. Due to the small variations of temperature and moisture within the shallow permafrost (here at about 0.6 m depth), the approach is unable to estimate OC with confidence. However, if the soil porosity is functionally related to the OC and mineral content, which is often observed in organic-rich Arctic soil, the uncertainty of OC estimate at this depth remarkably decreases. Our study documents the value of the new surface–subsurface, deterministic–stochastic inversion approach, as well as the benefit of including multiple types of data to estimate OC and associated hydrological–thermal dynamics.

58 GEOSCIENCES↗
DOE OSTI2024

Evaluating the Chemical Reactivity of DFT-Simulated Liquid Water with Hydrated Electrons via the Dual Descriptor

Modeling the various properties of liquid water, particularly its reactivity, has been a longstanding challenge for simulation methods. Recently, ab initio simulations based on density functional theory (DFT) have come to the fore as tenable methods for calculating the properties and reactivity of water, with varying degrees of success for different exchange-correlation functionals. In particular, hybrid-GGA and meta-GGA functionals have been shown to reproduce many of the structural, dynamical, and energetic properties of water to a high degree of accuracy relative to their computational cost. Here, we show that the dual descriptor (DD) measure of nucleophilicity and electrophilicity, which is sometimes used to elucidate organic chemistry reaction mechanisms, can also be used to characterize the reactivity of DFTsimulated liquid water. The DD is especially apt for understanding the reactivity of excess electrons with water as its calculation explicitly involves adding and removing an excess electron from a reference system. We use the DD to explore the reactivity of water simulated using three different DFT functionals: the LDA functional (LDA), a hybrid-GGA functional (PBE0), and a hybrid meta- GGA functional (SCAN0). Using the DD, we show that the SCAN0 functional with the standard 25% Hartree–Fock exchange produces simulated liquid water with many regions that are far more reactive than either PBE0 or LDA. To understand the implications of these highly reactive regions, we then add a strong nucleophile in the form of an excess electron and find that although PBE0 and LDA predict stable hydrated electrons, the excess electron reacts nearly instantaneously with SCAN0 water via proton abstraction to form a hydrogen atom and hydroxide ion. We show that the DD provides the ability to not only predict whether or not liquid water will react with a hydrated electron but also which particular waters will be involved solely from analyzing pure water configurations generated with each functional. We rationalize this result in terms of the known trap-seeking behavior of injected hydrated electrons, which are able to find the most electronegative region in bulk water. These results highlight the utility of the dual descriptor as a fast and interpretable method for investigating condensed-phase reactivity with excess electrons.

37 INORGANIC, ORGANIC, PHYSICAL, AND ANALYTICAL CH↗
DOE OSTI2020

Dark matter cores and cusps in spiral galaxies and their explanations

We compare proposed solutions to the core vs cusp issue of spiral galaxies, which has also been framed as a diversity problem, and demonstrate that the cuspiness of dark matter halos is correlated with the stellar surface brightness. We compare the rotation curve fits to the SPARC sample from a self-interacting dark matter (SIDM) model, which self-consistently includes the impact of baryons on the halo profile, and hydrodynamical N-body simulations with cold dark matter (CDM). The SIDM model predicts a strong correlation between the core size and the stellar surface density, and it provides the best global fit to the data. The CDM simulations without strong baryonic feedback effects fail to explain the large dark matter cores seen in low surface brightness galaxies. On the other hand, with strong feedback, CDM simulations do not produce galaxy analogs with high stellar and dark matter densities, and therefore they have trouble in explaining the rotation curves of high surface brightness galaxies. This implies that current feedback implementations need to be modified. We also explicitly show how the concentration-mass and stellar-to-halo mass relations together lead to a radial acceleration relation (RAR) in an averaged sense, and reiterate the point that the RAR does not capture the diversity of galaxy rotation curves in the inner regions. These results make a strong case for SIDM as the explanation for the cores and cusps of field galaxies.

79 ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS↗
DOE OSTI2015

Pore-Scale Process Coupling and Effective Surface Reaction Rates in Heterogeneous Subsurface Materials

This manuscript provides a review of pore-scale researches in literature including experimental and numerical approaches, and scale-dependent behavior of geochemical and biogeochemical reaction rates in heterogeneous porous media. A mathematical equation that can be used to predict the scale-dependent behavior of geochemical reaction rates in heterogeneous porous media has been derived. The derived effective rate expression explicitly links the effective reaction rate constant to the intrinsic rate constant, and to the pore-scale variations in reactant concentrations in porous media. Molecular simulations to calculate the intrinsic rate constants were provided. A few examples of pore-scale simulations were used to demonstrate the application of the equation to calculate effective rate constants in heterogeneous materials. The results indicate that the deviation of effective rate constant from the intrinsic rate in heterogeneous porous media is caused by the pore-scale distributions of reactants and their correlation, which are affected by the pore-scale coupling of reactions and transport.

Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory↗
DOE OSTI2018

On the Importance of Advective Versus Diffusive Transport in Controlling the Distribution of Methane Hydrate in Heterogeneous Marine Sediments

The occurrence of methane hydrate in marine reservoirs often correlates with the physical properties of the host sediments. High hydrate saturations (>60% of the pore volume) found in association with coarser-grained strata have been attributed to both enhanced advective transport through more permeable sediment layers and to perturbations in phase equilibrium related to pore space geometry that results in increased diffusive transport. To assess the relative importance of these mechanism in controlling hydrate occurrence, we develop a 1-D model for hydrate growth along dipping, coarse-grained layers embedded in a fine-grained sediment package. We explicitly account for pore size effects on methane solubility and permeability-driven variations in fluid flux. We show how the vertical distribution of hydrate varies in response to changes in grain size and rates of fluid advection, sedimentation, and in situ methane production. We then use our model to simulate centimeter-scale variations in hydrate saturation observed at Walker Ridge Block 313, Hole H in the Gulf of Mexico. We find that the largest concentrations of hydrate are controlled by diffusion, while increased advective methane supply favors more distributed growth throughout high-permeability regions. Our results hold promise for using well log-derived estimates of hydrate saturation to infer sediment properties and the sources and rates of methane supply during reservoir emplacement.

58 GEOSCIENCES↗
DOE OSTI2026

Plant‐Induced Changes Mediate Belowground Carbon Cycling in an Experimentally Warmed Peatland

Warming and elevated atmospheric CO 2 profoundly impact peatland ecosystems, particularly through changes in plant species composition. Plants regulate the initial input of organic compounds to peatland belowground systems, controlling the availability of electron donors and electron acceptors that fuel microbially mediated organic matter decomposition to CO 2 and CH 4 . However, explicit links between porewater CO 2 and CH 4 dynamics and plant-derived chemical compounds remain relatively undefined. In a whole ecosystem warming experiment, we investigated how warming affects plant leaf chemical composition and species assemblages, and how the alteration of leaf-derived organic compounds supplied to the subsurface impacts belowground CO 2 and CH 4 production. While earlier studies at our site found no temperature-dependent changes in CH 4 production pathways, our extended timeseries has revealed increased acetoclastic methanogenesis at higher temperatures in certain peat depths, correlated with elevated porewater phenolics. These changes appear driven by the observed increased plant productivity and altered vegetation inputs, which accelerate decomposition and fuel CH 4 production through enhanced substrate availability. In conclusion, we observed warming-induced changes in molecular composition both between and within plant species, suggesting that plant-mediated controls on belowground carbon processing are more complex than previously recognized.

Wilson, Rachel M. [Florida State Univ., Tallahasse↗
DOE OSTI2023

An effective field theory for non-maximal quantum chaos

In non-maximally quantum chaotic systems, the exponential behavior of out-of-time-ordered correlators (OTOCs) results from summing over exchanges of an infinite tower of higher “spin” operators. We construct an effective field theory (EFT) to capture these exchanges in (0 + 1) dimensions. The EFT generalizes the one for maximally chaotic systems, and reduces to it in the limit of maximal chaos. The theory predicts the general structure of OTOCs both at leading order in the 1/N expansion (N is the number of degrees of freedom), and after resuming over an infinite number of higher order 1/N corrections. These general results agree with those previously explicitly obtained in specific models. We also show that the general structure of the EFT can be extracted from the large q SYK model.

72 PHYSICS OF ELEMENTARY PARTICLES AND FIELDS↗
DOE OSTI2016

A path integral molecular dynamics study of the hyperfine coupling constants of the muoniated and hydrogenated acetone radicals

The on-the-fly ab initio density functional path integral molecular dynamics (PIMD) simulations, which can account for both the nuclear quantum effect and thermal effect, were carried out to evaluate the structures and “reduced” isotropic hyperfine coupling constants (HFCCs) for muoniated and hydrogenated acetone radicals (2-muoxy-2-propyl and 2-hydoxy-2-propyl) in vacuo. The reduced HFCC value from a simple geometry optimization calculation without both the nuclear quantum effect and thermal effect is −8.18 MHz, and that by standard ab initio molecular dynamics simulation with only the thermal effect and without the nuclear quantum effect is 0.33 MHz at 300 K, where these two methods cannot distinguish the difference between muoniated and hydrogenated acetone radicals. In contrast, the reduced HFCC value of the muoniated acetone radical by our PIMD simulation is 32.1 MHz, which is about 8 times larger than that for the hydrogenated radical of 3.97 MHz with the same level of calculation. We have found that the HFCC values are highly correlated with the local molecular structures; especially, the Mu—O bond length in the muoniated acetone radical is elongated due to the large nuclear quantum effect of the muon, which makes the expectation value of the HFCC larger. Although our PIMD result calculated in vacuo is about 4 times larger than the measured experimental value in aqueous solvent, the ratio of these HFCC values between muoniated and hydrogenated acetone radicals in vacuo is in reasonable agreement with the ratio of the experimental values in aqueous solvent (8.56 MHz and 0.9 MHz); the explicit presence of solvent molecules has a major effect on decreasing the reduced muon HFCC of in vacuo calculations for the quantitative reproduction.

37 INORGANIC, ORGANIC, PHYSICAL, AND ANALYTICAL CH↗
DOE OSTI2025

Robust preparation of ground state phases under noisy imaginary time evolution

Nonunitary state preparation protocols such as imaginary time evolution (ITE) offer substantial advantages relative to unitary ones, including the ability to prepare certain long-range correlated states more efficiently. Here, we ask whether such protocols are also robust to noise arising due to coupling to the environment. We consider a nonunitary ITE “circuit” subjected to a variety of noise models and investigate whether the resulting steady state remains in the same phase as the target state of the ITE at finite noise strength. Taking the one-dimensional quantum Ising model as a concrete example, we find that the ground-state order and associated phase transition persist in the presence of noise, provided the noise does not explicitly break the symmetry that protects the phase transition. That is, the noise must possess the protecting symmetry in a weak (or average) form. Our analysis is facilitated by a mapping to an effective Hamiltonian picture in a doubled Hilbert space. We discuss possible implications of these findings for quantum simulation on noisy quantum hardware. Published by the American Physical Society 2025

71 CLASSICAL AND QUANTUM MECHANICS, GENERAL PHYSIC↗