Emergence of universality in transport of noisy free fermions

Abstract

We analyze the effects of various forms of noise on one-dimensional systems of non-interacting fermions. In the strong noise limit, we demonstrate, under mild assumptions, that the statistics of the fermionic correlation matrix in the thermodynamic limit follow a universal form described by the recently introduced quantum simple symmetric exclusion process (Q-SSEP). For charge transport, we show that Q-SSEP, along with all models in its universality class, shares the same large deviation function for the transferred charge as the classical SSEP model. The method we introduce to derive this result relies on a gauge-like invariance associated with the choice of the bond where the current is measured. This approach enables the explicit calculation of the cumulant generating function for both Q-SSEP and SSEP and establishes an exact correspondence between them. These analytical findings are validated by extensive numerical simulations. Our results establish that a wide range of noisy free-fermionic models share the same Q-SSEP universality class and show that their transport properties are essentially classical.