Exploring Many-Body Quantum Geometry Beyond the Quantum Metric with Correlation Functions: A Time-Dependent Perspective

The quantum geometric tensor and quantum Fisher information have recently been shown to provide a unified geometric description of the linear response of many-body systems. However, a similar geometric description of higher-order perturbative phenomena including nonlinear response in generic quantum systems is lacking. In this talk, we discuss a general framework for the time-dependent quantum geometry of many-body systems by treating external perturbing fields as coordinates on the space of density matrices. We use the Bures distance between the initial and time-evolved density matrix to define geometric quantities through a perturbative expansion. To lowest order, we derive a time-dependent generalization of the Bures metric related to the spectral density of linear response functions. At next order in the expansion, we define a time-dependent Bures-Levi-Civita connection for general many-body systems. We show that the connection is the sum of one contribution that is related to a second-order nonlinear response function, and a second contribution that captures the higher geometric structure of first-order perturbation theory. We conclude by comparing our approach to known results for free fermion systems.