Analytic Continuation Between Real- and Imaginary-Time Quantum Dynamics and the Fundamental Instability of Inverse Reconstruction

TL;DR

This paper introduces a spectral-semigroup framework linking real- and imaginary-time quantum dynamics via analytic continuation, revealing fundamental limits and stability conditions for reconstructing dynamical information.

Contribution

It develops a unified spectral approach that models quantum evolution as a spectral filtering process, clarifying the stability and irreversibility of inverse analytic continuation.

Findings

Imaginary-time evolution acts as a fractional low-pass filter.

Stable reconstruction is possible within a spectral window.

Spectral structure determines the fidelity of inverse recovery.

Abstract

We develop a unified spectral-semigroup framework that connects real-time and imaginary-time quantum dynamics through analytic continuation. Within this formulation, evolution is expressed as an exponential reweighting of spectral components generated by a single operator $\mathcal{G}$, placing unitary and dissipative dynamics on equal footing within a common spectral structure. The mapping naturally induces a nonlocal fractional operator in time, giving rise to a contractive semigroup governed by a square-root spectral deformation and identifying imaginary-time evolution as an effective fractional low-pass filter. While exponential attenuation suppresses high-frequency components, the inverse transformation remains systematically controllable within a well-defined spectral window. In this regime, stable reconstruction of low-energy and coarse-grained dynamical features is achieved, establishing a predictive relation between imaginary-time evolution and recoverable information. This leads to a quantitative description of a bandwidth-resolved asymmetry between forward propagation and inverse recovery. Across systems with continuous and discrete spectra, few-level coherence, and non-Hermitian generators, we demonstrate that spectral structure governs reconstruction fidelity in a unified manner. In particular, non-Hermitian and open-system settings reveal that irreversibility emerges as a geometry- and scale-dependent feature of the spectrum, tied to both damping and eigenstate non-orthogonality. These results recast analytic continuation as a structured, scale-dependent filtering process with quantifiable and systematically accessible reconstruction limits, providing a unified perspective on the interplay between dynamics, spectral geometry, and information recovery.