The Diagrammar of Quantum Magnusian

Abstract: The logarithm of the time-evolution operator has been termed Magnusian, on account of the fact that its expansion describes the Magnus series. The diagrammatic expansion and computation of the classical Magnusian has been completely established in terms of tree graphs and their Hopf algebra. Recent works initiated extensions into quantum field theory, revealing general structures of loop expansions while finding intriguing relations between different diagrams. In this work, we advance the loop expansion further by providing an efficient diagrammatic algorithm to calculate the weight factor of each graph in the quantum Magnusian, known as the Murua coefficient. This is achieved by incorporating two complementary perspectives on the Magnusian at the same time: the color basis and the black-and-white basis. We extract the Murua coefficients from the Magnus series by utilizing these two bases while implementing an exponentiated Wick contraction. In turn, we identify the loop-level extension of Murua's recursive formula. Eventually, we establish a set of edge contraction rules which facilitate a direct recursive computation of the Murua coefficients at the purely diagrammatic level, without referencing or directly manipulating the underlying Magnus expansion. This shows that the matrix elements of the quantum Magnusian can be computed from graph manipulations alone.