A general theory is presented for the treatment of decoherence of a multilevel quantum system (with many degrees of freedom) interacting with multi-bath reservoir and driven by ac fields. In this approach, the system is described by a reduced density operator and the multi-bath reservoir is characterized by a number of spectral densities. The reduced density operator is governed by the master equation in which the effect of ac driving fields and the leakage to non-computational states are included. The theory is applied to the study of decoherence of a two-dimensional (2D) SQUID flux qubit coupled to control and readout circuits. The predicted results are in very good agreement with available experimental results in the absence of driving fields and with the analytic results of a dissipative two-level system in the presence of weak driving fields. The relaxation and decoherence times versus the parameters and temperature of the control and readout circuits are also explored in details to facilitate the optimization of the 2D SQUID qubit.
We put forward a scheme based on reservoir engineering to protect quantum coherence from leaking to bath, in which we intensely disturb the Lorentzian bath by N harmonic oscillators. We show that the intense disturbance changes the spectrum of the bath and reduces the qubit-bath interaction. Furthermore, we give the exact time evolution with the Lorentzian spectrum by a master equation, and calculate the concurrence and survival probability of the qubits to demonstrate the effect of the intense bath disturbance on the protection of coherence. Meanwhile, we reveal the dynamic effects of counter…
A multilevel four-stroke engine where the thermalization stokes are generated by unitary collisions with bath particles is analyzed. Our model is solvable even when the engine operates far from thermal equilibrium and in the strong system-bath coupling. Necessary operation conditions for the heat machine to perform as an engine or a refrigerator are derived. We relate the work and efficiency of the device to local and non-local statistical properties of the baths (purity, mutual coincidence etc.). In particular, we relate the Clausius inequality to the symmetrized relative entropy of the baths…
This theoretical proposal investigates how resonant interactions occurring when a harmonic oscillator is fed with a stream of entangled qubits allow us to stabilize squeezed states of the harmonic oscillator. We show that the properties of the squeezed state stabilized by this engineered reservoir, including the squeezing strength, can be tuned at will through the parameters of the "input" qubits, albeit in tradeoff with the convergence rate. We also discuss the influence of the type of entanglement in the input, from a pairwise case to a more widely distributed case. This paper can be read in…
We establish a quantum functional central limit for the dynamics of a system coupled to a Fermionic bath with a general interaction linear in the creation, annihilation and scattering of the bath reservoir. Following a quantum Markovian limit, we realize the open dynamical evolution of the system as an adapted quantum stochastic process driven by Fermionic Noise.
We study how to control the dynamics of tripartite entanglement among optical cavities using non-Markovian baths. In particular, we demonstrate how the reservoir engineering through the utilization of non-Markovian baths with different types of Lorentzian and ohmic spectral densities can lead to an entanglement survival for longer times and in some cases considerable regain of seemingly lost entanglement. Both of these behaviors indicate a better sustainability of entanglement (in time) compared to the usual Markovian bath situations which assumes a flat spectrum of the bath around the system …
The interaction of an atomic two-level system and a squeezed vacuum leads to interesting novel effects in atomic dynamics, including line narrowing in resonance fluorescence and absorption spectra, and a suppressed (enhanced) decay of the in-phase and out-of phase component of the atomic polarization. On the experimental side these predictions have so far eluded observation, essentially due to the difficulty of embedding atoms in a 4 pi squeezed vacuum. In this paper we show how to ``engineer'' a squeezed-bath-type interaction for an effective two-level system. In the simplest example, our two…
A unified theory is given of dynamically modified decay and decoherence of field-driven multilevel multipartite entangled states that are weakly coupled to zero-temperature baths or undergo random phase fluctuations. The theory allows for arbitrary local differences in their coupling to the environment. Due to such differences, the optimal driving-field modulation to ensure maximal fidelity is found to substantially differ from conventional ``Bang-Bang'' or $π$-phase flips of the single-qubit evolution.
Thermodynamic Roles of Quantum Environments: From Heat Baths to Work Reservoirs
Institute of Physics, University of Freiburg（弗赖堡大学物理研究所）；Dipartimento di Fisica “Aldo Pontremoli”, Università degli Studi di Milano（米兰大学阿尔多·蓬特莫利物理系）；EUCOR Centre for Quantum Science and Quantum Computing, University of Freiburg（弗赖堡大学EUCOR量子科学与工程中心）
We compare quantum Otto engines based on two different cycle models: a two-bath model, with a standard heat source and sink, and a measurement-based protocol, where the role of heat source is played by a quantum measurement. We furthermore study these cycles using two different `working substances': a single qutrit (spin-1 particle) or a pair of qubits (spin-1/2 particles) interacting via the XXZ Heisenberg interaction. Although both cycle models have the same efficiency when applied on a single-qubit working substance, we find that both can reach higher efficiencies using these more complex w…
A pure-dephasing reservoir acting on an individual quantum system induces loss of coherence without energy exchange. When acting on composite quantum systems, dephasing reservoirs can lead to a radically different behavior. Transport of energy between two pure-dephasing markovian reservoirs is predicted in this work. They are connected through a chain of coupled sites. The baths are kept in thermal equilibrium at distinct temperatures. Quantum coherence between sites is generated in the steady-state regime and results in the underlying mechanism sustaining the effect. A quantum model for the r…
The time evolution of quantum correlations of entangled two-mode continuous variable states is examined in single-reservoir as well as two-reservoir models, representing noisy correlated or uncorrelated non-Markovian quantum channels. For this purpose the model of quantum Brownian motion is extended. Various separability criteria for Gaussian continuous variable systems are applied. In both types of reservoir models moderate non-Markovian effects prolong the separability time scales. However, in these models the properties of the stationary state may differ. In the two-reservoir model the init…
We consider a two reservoir model of quantum error correction with a hot bath causing errors in the qubits and a cold bath cooling the ancilla qubits to a fiducial state. We consider error correction protocols both with and without measurement of the ancilla state. The error correction acts as a kind of refrigeration process to maintain the data qubits in a low entropy state by periodically moving the entropy to the ancilla qubits and then to the cold reservoir. We quantify the performance of the error correction as a function of the reservoir temperatures and cooling rate by means of the fide…
We analyse the problem of a two-level atom interacting with a time-dependent dissipative environment modelled by a bath of reservoir modes. In the model of this paper the principal features of the reservoir structure remain constant in time, but the microscopic structure does not. In the context of an atom in a leaky cavity this corresponds to a fixed cavity and a time-dependent external bath. In this situation we show that by chirping the reservoir modes sufficiently fast it is possible to inhibit, or dramatically enhance the decay of the atomic system, even though the gross reservoir structu…
We investigate the effects of a low frequency (acoustic) phonon bath on the dynamics of a quantum dot modelled as a cascade three-level system. We show that the phonon bath appears to the upper transition of the cascade system as a broadband reservoir of inverted rather than conventional harmonic oscillators. The action of the annihilation and creation operators of the inverted oscillator are interchanges relative to those of the usual harmonic oscillator that it serves as a linear amplifier to the system, and thereby gives rise to unusual features in the dynamics of the quantum dot. We find t…
We show that the critical exponent of a quantum phase transition in a damped-driven open system is determined by the spectral density function of the reservoir. We consider the open-system variant of the Dicke model, where the driven boson mode and also the large N-spin couple to independent reservoirs at zero temperature. The critical exponent, which is $1$ if there is no spin-bath coupling, decreases below 1 when the spin couples to a sub-Ohmic reservoir.
In this paper we investigate non-Markovian evolution of a two-level system (qubit) in a bosonic bath under influence of an external classical fluctuating environment. The interaction with the bath has the Lorentzian spectral density, and the fluctuating environment (stochastic field) is represented by a set of Ornstein-Uhlenbeck processes. Each of the subenvironments of the composite environment is able to induce non-Markovian dynamics of the two-level system. By means of the numerically exact method of hierarchical equations of motion, we study dependence of the steady states of the two-level…
We study the non-Markovian entanglement dynamics of two qubits in a common squeezed bath. We see remarkable difference between the non-Markovian entanglement dynamics with its Markovian counterpart. We show that a non-Markovian decoherence free state is also decoherence free in the Markovian regime, but all the Markovian decoherence free states are not necessarily decoherence free in the non-Markovian domain. We extend our calculation from squeezed vacuum bath to squeezed thermal bath, where we see the effect of finite bath temperatures on the entanglement dynamics.
We study the relation between the sudden death and revival of the entanglement of two qubits in a common squeezed reservoir, and the normal decoherence, by getting closer to the Decoherence Free Subspace and calculating the effect on the death and revival times.
We propose a scheme to cool down a mechanical resonator to its quantum ground-state, which is interacting with a working fluid via an optomechanical-like coupling. As opposed to standard laser cooling schemes where coherence renders the motion of a resonator to its ground-state, we consider an incoherent thermal source to achieve the same aim. We show that simultaneous cooling of two degenerate or near-degenerate mechanical resonators is possible, which is otherwise a challenging goal to achieve. The generalization of this method to the simultaneous cooling of multiple resonators is straightfo…
We consider a system subject to a quantum optical master equation at finite temperature and study a class of conditional dynamics obtained by monitoring its totally or partially purified environment. More specifically, drawing from the notion that the thermal state of the environment may be regarded as the local state of a lossy and noisy two-mode squeezed state, we consider conditional dynamics ("unravellings") resulting from the homodyne detection of the two modes of such a state. Thus, we identify a class of unravellings parametrised by the loss rate suffered by the environmental two-mode s…
We consider thermal machines powered by locally equilibrium reservoirs that share classical or quantum correlations. The reservoirs are modelled by the so-called collisional model or repeated interactions model. In our framework, two reservoir particles, initially prepared in a thermal state, are correlated through a unitary transformation and afterwards interact locally with the two quantum subsystems which form the working fluid. For a particular class of unitaries, we show how the transformation applied to the reservoir particles affects the amount of heat transferred and the work produced.…
In this review the debated rapport between thermodynamics and quantum mechanics is addressed in the framework of the theory of periodically-driven/controlled quantum-thermodynamic machines. The basic model studied here is that of a two-level system (TLS), whose energy is periodically modulated while the system is coupled to thermal baths. When the modulation interval is short compared to the bath memory time, the system-bath correlations are affected, thereby causing cooling or heating of the TLS, depending on the interval. In steady state, a periodically-modulated TLS coupled to two distinct …
The recently developed technique combining the weak coupling limit with the Floquet formalism is applied to a model of two-level atom driven by a strong laser field and weakly coupled to heat baths. Firstly, the case of a single electromagnetic bath at zero temperature is discussed and the formula for resonance fluorescence is derived. The expression describes the well-known Mollow triplet, but its details differ from the standard ones based on additional simplifying assumptions. The second example describes the case of two thermal reservoirs: an electromagnetic one at finite temperature and t…
The time evolution of occupation number is studied for fermionic or bosonic oscillator linearly fully coupled to several fermionic and bosonic heat baths. The influence of characteristics of thermal reservoirs of different statistics on the non-stationary population probability is analyzed at large times. Applications of the absence of equilibrium in such systems for creating a dynamic (nonstationary) memory storage are discussed.
System of the quantum Langevin equations for two quantum coupling oscillators within independent heat baths of quantum oscillators are obtained using a model Hamiltonian and corresponding Heisenberg equations of motion. Expressions for mean energy of coupled oscillators and their mean energy of interaction are derived and analyzed. Nonmonotonic dependence of the interaction energy versus a coupling constant is demonstrated and explained. Nontrivial dependence of the quantities as a consequence of the difference in temperatures of heat baths is shown.
We discuss whether, and under which conditions, it is possible to realize a heat engine simply by dynamically modulating the couplings between the quantum working medium and thermal reservoirs. For that purpose, we consider the paradigmatic model of a quantum harmonic oscillator, exposed to a minimal modulation, that is, a monochromatic driving of the coupling to only one of the thermal baths. We demonstrate, at any order in the system/bath coupling strength, that in this setup non--Markovianity of the bath is a necessary condition to obtain a heat engine. In addition, we identify suitable str…
We demonstrate how a time-dependent dissipative environment may be used as a tool for controlling the quantum state of a two-level atom. In our model system the frequency and coupling strength associated with microscopic reservoir modes are modulated, while the principal features of the reservoir structure remain fixed in time. Physically, this may be achieved by containing a static atom-cavity system inside an oscillating external bath. We show that it is possible to dynamically decouple the atom from its environment, despite the fact that the two remain resonant at all times. This can lead t…
Abstract Reservoir engineering is an important tool for quantum information science and quantum thermodynamics since it allows for preparing and/or protecting special quantum states of single or multipartite systems or to investigate fundamental questions of the thermodynamics as quantum thermal machines and their efficiencies. Here we employ this technique to engineer reservoirs with arbitrary (effective) negative and positive temperatures for a single spin system. To this end, we firstly engineer an appropriate interaction between a qubit system, a carbon nuclear spin, to a fermionic reservo…
We demonstrate that criticality in a driven-dissipative system is strongly influenced by the spectral properties of the reservoir. We study the open-system realization of the Dicke model, where a bosonic cavity mode couples to a large spin formed by two motional modes of an atomic Bose-Einstein condensate. The cavity mode is driven by a high frequency laser and it decays to a Markovian bath, while the atomic mode interacts with a colored reservoir. We reveal that the soft mode fails to describe the characteristics of the criticality. We calculate the critical exponent of the superradiant phase…
The effect of a thermal reservoir is investigated on a bipartite Gaussian state. We derive a pre-Lindblad master equation in the non-rotating wave approximation for the system. We then solve the master equation for a bipartite harmonic oscillator Hamiltonian with entangled initial state. We show that for strong damping the loss of entanglement is the same as for freely evolving particles. However, if the damping is small, the entanglement is shown to oscillate and eventually tend to a constant nonzero value.
A general method is developed which enables the exact treatment of the non-Markovian quantum dynamics of open systems through a Monte Carlo simulation technique. The method is based on a stochastic formulation of the von Neumann equation of the composite system and employs a pair of product states following a Markovian random jump process. The performance of the method is illustrated by means of stochastic simulations of the dynamics of open systems interacting with a Bosonic reservoir at zero temperature and with a spin bath in the strong coupling regime.
We present a theoretical formalism for resonance fluorescence radiating from a two-level system (TLS) driven by any periodic driving and coupled to multiple reservoirs. The formalism is derived analytically based on the combination of Floquet theory and Born-Markov master equation. The formalism allows us to calculate the spectrum when the Floquet states and quasienergies are analytically or numerically solved for simple or complicated driving fields. We can systematically explore the spectral features by implementing the present formalism. To exemplify this theory, we apply the unified formal…
We study the dynamics of entanglement in a two-qubit system interacting with a squeezed thermal bath via a dissipative system-reservoir interaction with the system and reservoir assumed to be in a separable initial state. The resulting entanglement is studied by making use of a recently introduced measure of mixed state entanglement via a probability density function which gives a statistical and geometrical characterization of entanglement by exploring the entanglement content in the various subspaces spanning the two-qubit Hilbert space. We also make an application of the two-qubit dissipati…
We show that quantum absorption refrigerators, which have traditionally been studied as of three qubits, each of which is connected to a thermal reservoir, can also be constructed by using three qubits and two thermal baths, where two of the qubits, including the qubit to be locally cooled, are connected to a common bath. With a careful choice of the system, bath, and qubit-bath interaction parameters within the Born-Markov and rotating-wave approximations, one of the qubits attached to the common bath achieves a cooling in the steady state. We observe that the proposed refrigerator may also o…
The Redfield equation describes the dynamics of a quantum system weakly coupled to one or more reservoirs and is widely used in theory of open quantum system. However, the assumption of weak system-reservoir coupling is often not fully adequate and higher-order corrections to the Redfield equation with respect to the system-bath coupling is required. Here we propose a general method of derivation of higher-order corrections to the Redfield quantum master equation based on the hierarchical equations of motion (HEOM). Also we derive conditions of validity of the Redfield equation as well as the …
The interaction of quantum emitters with structured baths modifies both their individual and collective dynamics. In González-Tudela \emph{et al} we show how exotic quantum dynamics emerge when QEs are spectrally tuned around the middle of the band of a two-dimensional structured reservoir, where we predict the failure of perturbative treatments, anisotropic interactions and novel super and subradiant behaviour. In this work, we provide further analysis of that situation, together with a complete analysis for the quantum emitter dynamics in spectral regions different from the center of the ban…
By using the effective non-Markovian measure [H.P. Breuer, E.M. Laine, J. Piilo, Phys. Rev. Lett. 103, 210401 (2009)], we investigate non-Markovian dynamics of a pair of two-level atoms (TLAs) system, each of which interacting with a local reservoir. We show that subsystem dynamics can be controlled by manipulating the coupling between TLAs, temperature and relaxation rate of the atoms. Moreover, the correlation between non-Markovianity of subsystem and entanglement between the subsystem and the structured bath is investigated, the results show that the emergence of non-Markovianity has a nega…
We use the system-plus-reservoir approach to study the quantum dynamics of a bipartite continuous variable system (two generic particles). We present an extension of the traditional model of a bath of oscillators which is capable of inducing an effective coupling between the two parts of the system depending on the choice made for the spectral density of the bath. The coupling is nonlinear in the system variables and an exponential dependence on these variables is imposed in order to guarantee the translational invariance of the model if the two particles are not subject to any external potent…
We extend the quantum theory of dissipation in the context of system-reservoir model, where the reservoir in question is kept in a nonequilibrium condition. Based on a systematic separation of time scales involved in the dynamics, appropriate generalizations of the fluctuation-dissipation and Einstein's relations have been pointed out. We show that the Wigner-Weisskopf decay of the system mode results in a rate constant which depending on the relaxation of nonequilibrium bath is dynamically modified. We also calculate the time-dependent spectra of a cavity mode with a suitable gain when the ca…
We derive the master equation of a system of two coupled qubits by taking into account their interaction with two independent bosonic baths. Important features of the dynamics are brought to light, such as the structure of the stationary state at general temperatures and the behaviour of the entanglement at zero temperature, showing the phenomena of sudden death and sudden birth as well as the presence of stationary entanglement for long times. The model here presented is quite versatile and can be of interest in the study of both Josephson junction architectures and cavity-QED.
We study the evolution of the entanglement of noninteracting qubits coupled to reservoirs under monitoring of the reservoirs by means of continuous measurements. We calculate the average of the concurrence of the qubits wavefunction over all quantum trajectories. For two qubits coupled to independent baths subjected to local measurements, this average decays exponentially with a rate depending on the measurement scheme only. This contrasts with the known disappearance of entanglement after a finite time for the density matrix in the absence of measurements. For two qubits coupled to a common b…
We explore the electromagnetic field coupled to a mechanical resonator via quadratic optomechanical interaction in the reversed dissipation regime where the mechanical damping rate is much larger than the cavity field dissipation rate. It is shown that in this regime, the cavity field effectively acquires an additional reservoir which is conditioned by the temperature of the mechanical bath as well as the mechanical damping rate. We analytically find the steady-state mean photon number and the critical temperature of the mechanical oscillator to cool or heat the coupled electromagnetic field. …
We present the general theory of a quantum heat machine based on an $N$-level system (working medium) whose $N-1$ excited levels are degenerate, a prerequisite for steady-state interlevel coherence. Our goal is to find out: To what extent is coherence in the working medium an asset for heat machines? The performance bounds of such a machine are common to (reciprocating) cycles that consist of consecutive strokes and continuous cycles wherein the periodically driven system is constantly coupled to cold and hot heat baths. Intriguingly, we find that the machine's performance strongly depends on …
The reduced dynamics of two interacting qubits coupled to two independent bosonic baths is investigated. The one-excitation dynamics is derived and compared with that based on the resolution of appropriate non-Markovian master equations. The Nakajima-Zwanzig and the time-convolutionless projection operator techniques are exploited to provide a description of the non-Markovian features of the dynamics of the two-qubits system. The validity of such approximate methods and their range of validity in correspondence to different choices of the parameters describing the system are brought to light.
Autonomous quantum thermal machines do not require an external coherent drive or work input to perform the desired tasks, which makes them a promising candidate for thermal management in quantum systems. Here, we propose an autonomous quantum thermal machine in which two uncoupled macroscopic mechanical resonators or microwave resonators achieve considerable entanglement via a hot thermal bath. This becomes possible by coupling the resonators to a common two-level system or third harmonic oscillator and driving it by the hot incoherent thermal bath. The critical step to make the entanglement i…
We study energetic exchanges and fluctuations in two-stroke quantum thermodynamic engines where the working fluid is represented by two multilevel quantum systems, i.e. qudits, the heat flow is allowed by relaxation with two thermal reservoirs at different temperatures, and the work exchange is operated by a partial-swap unitary interaction. We identify three regimes of operation (heat engine, refrigerator, and thermal accelerator), present the thermodynamic uncertainty relations between the entropy production and the signal-to-noise ratio of work and heat, and derive the full joint probabilit…
