Based on generalized quantum Langevin equations for the tight-binding wave function amplitudes and lattice displacements, electron and phonon quantum transport are obtained exactly using molecular dynamics (MD) in the ballistic regime. The electron-phonon interactions can be handled with a quasi-classical approximation. Both charge and energy transport and their interplay can be studied. We compare the MD results with that of a fully quantum mechanical nonequilibrium Green's function (NEGF) approach for the electron currents. We find a ballistic to diffusive transition of the electron conduction in one dimensional chains as the chain length increases.
Transport through coupled quantum dots in a phonon bath is studied using the recently developed real-time renormalization-group method. Thereby, the problem can be treated beyond perturbation theory regarding the complete interaction. A reliable solution for the stationary tunnel current is obtained for the case of moderately strong couplings of the dots to the leads and to the phonon bath. Any other parameter is arbitrary, and the complete electron-phonon interaction is taken into account. Experimental results are quantitatively reproduced by taking into account a finite extension of the wave…
The properties of an unconventional, single mode phonon bath coupled to a quantum dot, are investigated within the rotating wave approximation. The electron current through the dot induces an out of equilibrium bath, with a phonon distribution qualitatively different from the thermal one. In selected transport regimes, such a distribution is characterized by a peculiar selective population of few phonon modes and can exhibit a sub-Poissonian behavior. It is shown that such a sub-Poissonian behavior is favored by a double occupancy of the dot. The crossover from a unequilibrated to a convention…
In a molecular junction (MJ) which connects two electrical leads, electron-phonon coupling has significant effects on the transport properties. However, the MJ is not thermally isolated and the phonons can be coupled to another thermal bath. For strong enough couplings, the bath thermalizes phonons on the MJ so that their number would be bias independent. However, in medium and weak coupling regimes, the number of phonons created in MJ depends on the bias voltage. Obtaining the master equation (ME) for this system and comparing the results with the case where we have no such thermal bath, we s…
At low temperatures, the thermal wavelength of acoustic phonons in a metallic thin film on a substrate can widely exceed the film thickness. It is thus generally believed that a mesoscopic device operating at low temperature does not carry an individual phonon population. In this work, we provide direct experimental evidence for the thermal decoupling of phonons in a mesoscopic quantum device from its substrate phonon heat bath at a sub-Kelvin temperature. A simple heat balance model assuming an independent phonon bath following the usual electron-phonon and Kapitza coupling laws can account f…
We introduce an exactly solvable model to study decoherence of a central spin interacting with a spin bath where the coupling is mediated by phonons which we assume to be in a coherent state or thermal distribution. For the coherent state case, we find that the decoherence factor decays in a Gaussian fashion and it becomes independent of the phonon frequencies at short times. If the phonon energies are much larger than spin-phonon coupling or bath spins are fully polarized, decoherence time becomes independent of the initial phonon state. For the thermal state case, phonons play more important…
We develop a theoretical frame to investigate the single-photon emission spectral efficiency of a solid-state nano-emitter embedded in a high quality factor micro-cavity. This study encompasses the case of localized excitons embedded in a one, two or three-dimensional matrix. The populations evolutions are calculated based on a spin-boson model, using the non-interacting blip approximation (NIBA). We find that the single-photon spectral efficiency of the cavity-coupled emitter can be expressed by a simple formula, taking as inputs the free-space emission and absorption spectra of the emitter a…
We study the resonance fluorescence spectra of a driven quantum dot placed inside a high $Q$ semiconductor cavity and interacting with an acoustic phonon bath. The dynamics is calculated using a time-convolutionless master equation obtained in the polaron frame. We demonstrate pronounced spectral broadening of the Mollow sidebands through cavity-emission which, for small cavity-coupling rates, increases quadratically with the Rabi frequency. However, for larger cavity coupling rates, this broadening dependence is found to be more complex. This field-dependent Mollow triplet broadening is prima…
A three terminal nanoscale refrigeration concept based on a vibron-coupled quantum dot hybrid system coupled to two electronic reservoirs and a phonon bath is proposed and analyzed in detail. While investigating the non-trivial role of electron-phonon interactions, we show that, although they are well known to be detrimental from a general refrigeration perspective, can be engineered to favorably improve the trade-off between the cooling power (CP) and the coefficient-of-performance (COP). Furthermore, an additional improvement in the trade-off can be facilitated by applying a high electronic …
Longitudinal optical phonons have been used to interpret the electronic energy relaxation in quantum dots and at the same time they served as a reservoir, with which the electronic subsystem is in contact. Such a phonon subsystem is expected to be passive, namely, in a long-time limit the whole system should be able to achieve such a stationary state, in which statistical distributions of both subsystems do not change in time. We pay attention to this property of the LO phonon bath. We show the passivity property of the so far used approximations to electronic transport in quantum dots. Also w…
We develop a "chain-boson model" master equation, within the Born-Markov approximation, for a few superconducting quantum interference devices (SQUIDs) coupled into a chain and exchanging their angular momenta with a low temperature phonon bath. Our master equation has four generators; we concentrate on the damping and diffusion and use them to study the relaxation and decoherence of a Heisenberg SQUID chain whose spectrum exhibits critical point energy-level crossings, entangled states, and pairs of resonant transitions. We note that at an energy-level crossing the relevant bath wavelengths a…
We investigate the time-resolved quantum transport properties of phonons in arbitrary harmonic systems connected to phonon baths at different temperatures. We obtain a closed analytic expression of the time-dependent one-particle reduced density matrix by explicitly solving the equations of motion for the nonequilibrium Green's function. This is achieved through a well-controlled approximation of the frequency-dependent bath self-energy. Our result allows for exploring transient oscillations and relaxation times of local heat currents, and correctly reduces to an earlier known result in the st…
We have studied the interplay of a local phonon mode embedded in a metallic host (Holstein impurity model) using Abelian bosonization. The phonon frequency softens, which takes place in two steps: first, their frequency starts softening, and acquires finite lifetime. Then oscillations disappear from the response, and two distinct, finite dampings characterize them. Similar behaviour shows up in the spin-boson model. Due to phonons, the electrons experience an attractive, dynamic interaction. As a result, the electronic charge response enhances similarly to the spin response in the Kondo model.…
We have studied the dissipative dynamics of a driven electronic spin trapped in a quantum dot. We consider the dissipative mechanism as due to the indirect coupling of the electronic spin to acoustic phonons via the spin-orbit/electron-phonon couplings. Using an effective spectral function of the dissipative phonon bath, we evaluated the expectation values of the spin components through the Bloch-Redfield theory. We show that due to a sharp bath resonance present in the effective spectral function, with typical energy much smaller than the electronic confinement energy, the dissipative spin ha…
The quantum oscillations of population in an asymmetric double quantum dots system coupled to a phonon bath are investigated theoretically. It is shown how the environmental temperature has effect on the system.
We report on electron cooling power measurements in few-layer graphene excited by Joule heating by means of a new setup combining electrical and optical probes of the electron and phonon baths temperatures. At low bias, noise thermometry allows us to retrieve the well known acoustic phonon cooling regimes below and above the Bloch Grüneisen temperature, with additional control over the phonon bath temperature. At high electrical bias, we show the relevance of direct optical investigation of the electronic temperature by means of black-body radiation measurements that provide higher accuracy th…
We demonstrate electronic cooling of 1D phonon modes in suspended nanowires for the first time, using normal metal--insulator--superconductor (NIS) tunnel junctions. Simultaneous cooling of both electrons and phonons to a common temperature was achieved. In comparison with non-suspended devices, better cooling performance is achieved in the whole operating range of bath temperatures between 0.1-0.7 K. The observed low-temperature thermal transport characteristics are consistent with scattering of ballistic phonons at the nanowire-bulk contact as being the mechanism limiting thermal transport. …
This paper examines the thermoelectric response of a dissipative quantum dot heat engine based on the Anderson-Holstein model in two relevant operating limits: (i) when the dot phonon modes are out of equilibrium, and (ii) when the dot phonon modes are strongly coupled to a heat bath. In the first case, a detailed analysis of the physics related to the interplay between the quantum dot level quantization, the on-site Coulomb interaction and the electron-phonon coupling on the thermoelectric performance reveals that an n-type heat engine performs better than a p-type heat engine. In the second …
Semiconductor quantum dots (QDs) have been demonstrated to be versatile candidates to study the fundamentals of light-matter interaction [1-3]. In contrast with atom optics, dissipative processes are induced by the inherent coupling to the environment and are typically perceived as a major obstacle towards stable performances in experiments and applications [4]. In this paper we show that this is not necessarily the case. In fact, the memory of the environment can enhance coherent quantum optical effects. In particular, we demonstrate that the non-Markovian coupling to an incoherent phonon bat…
We present a detailed theoretical study of non-Markovian dynamics in the fluorescence spectrum of a driven semiconductor quantum dot (QD), embedded in a cavity and coupled to a three-dimensional (3D) acoustic phonon reservoir. In particular, we investigate the effect of pure dephasing on one of the side-peaks of the Mollow-triplet spectrum, expressed in terms of the off-diagonal element of the reduced system operator. The QD is modeled as a two-level system with an excited state representing a single exciton, and ground state represents the absence of an exciton. Coupling to the radiative mode…
The dynamics of an open quantum system is usually studied by performing a weak-coupling and weak-correlation expansion in the system-bath interaction. For systems exhibiting strong couplings and highly non-Markovian behavior this approach is not justified. We apply a recently proposed correlated projection superoperator technique to the model of a central spin coupled to a spin bath via full Heisenberg interaction. Analytical solutions to both the Nakajima-Zwanzig and the time-convolutionless master equation are determined and compared with the results of the exact solution. The correlated pro…
Self-assembled quantum dots are ideal structures in which to test theories of open quantum systems: Confined exciton states can be coherently manipulated and their decoherence properties are dominated by interactions with acoustic phonons. We here describe the interaction of a pair of un-coupled, driven, quantum dot excitons with a common phonon environment, and find that this coupling effectively generates two kinds of interaction between the two quantum dots: An elastic coupling mediated by virtual phonons and an inelastic coupling mediated by real phonons. We show that both of these interac…
Modeling of thermal transport in practical nanostructures requires making trade-offs between the size of the system and the completeness of the model. We study quantum heat transfer in a self-consistent thermal bath setup consisting of two lead regions connected by a center region. Atoms both in the leads and in the center region are coupled to quantum Langevin heat baths that mimic the damping and dephasing of phonon waves by anharmonic scattering. This approach treats the leads and the center region on same footing and thereby allows for a simple and physically transparent thermalization of …
The transition from weakly damped coherent motion to localization in the context of the spin-boson model has been the subject of numerous studies with distinct behavior depending on the form of the phonon-bath spectral density, $J\left(ω\right)\proptoω^{s}$. Sub-Ohmic ($s<1$) and Ohmic ($s=1$) spectral densities show a clear localization transition at zero temperature and zero bias, while for super-Ohmic ($s>1$) spectral densities this transition disappears. In this work, we consider the influence of the phonon-bath spectral density on the \emph{nonequilibrium} dynamics of a quantum dot with e…
We propose a new method to study non-equilibrium dynamics of scalar fields starting from non-Gaussian initial conditions using Keldysh field theory. We use it to study dynamics of phonons coupled to non-interacting bosonic and fermionic baths, starting from initial Fock states. We find that in one dimension long wavelength phonons coupled to fermionic baths do not thermalize both at low and high bath-temperatures. At low temperature, constraints from energy-momentum conservation lead to a narrow bandwidth of particle-hole excitations and the phonons effectively do not see this bath. On the oth…
We consider a harmonic oscillator under periodic driving and coupled to two harmonic-oscillator heat baths at different temperatures. We use the thermofield transformation with chain mapping for this setup, which allows us to study the unitary evolution of the system and the baths up to a time when the periodic steady state emerges in the system. We characterize this periodic steady state, and we show that, by tuning the system and the bath parameters, one can turn this system from an engine to an accelerator or even to a heater. The possibility to study the unitary evolution of the system and…
We investigate electron-phonon coupling in a narrow suspended metallic wire, in which the phonon modes are restricted to one dimension but the electrons behave three-dimensionally. Explicit theoretical results related to the known bulk properties are derived. We find out that longitudinal vibration modes can be cooled by electronic tunnel refrigeration far below the bath temperature provided the mechanical quality factors of the modes are sufficiently high. The obtained results apply to feasible experimental configurations.
A two-site nanostructure (e.g, a "molecule") bridging two conducting leads and connected to a phonon bath is considered. The two relevant levels closest to the Fermi energy are connected each to its lead. The leads have slightly different temperatures and chemical potentials and the nanos- tructure is also coupled to a thermal (third) phonon bath. The 3 x 3 linear transport ("Onsager") matrix is evaluated, along with the ensuing new figure of merit, and found to be very favorable for thermoelectric energy conversion.
Spin-polarized transport through a quantum dot strongly coupled to ferromagnetic electrodes with non-collinear magnetic moments is analyzed theoretically in terms of the non-equilibrium Green function formalism. Electrons in the dot are assumed to be coupled to a phonon bath. The influence of electron-phonon coupling on tunnelling current, linear and nonlinear conductance, and on tunnel magnetoresistance is studied in detail. Variation of the main Kondo peaks and phonon satellites with the angle between magnetic moments of the leads is analyzed.
We present a technique for treating many particles moving inside a ballistic interferometer, under the influence of a quantum-mechanical environment (phonons, photons, Nyquist noise etc.). Our approach is based on solving the coupled Heisenberg equations of motion of the many-particle system and the bath and is inspired by the quantum Langevin method known for the Caldeira Leggett model. It allows to study decoherence and the influence of the bath on other properties of the interferometer. As a first application, we treat a fermionic Mach-Zehnder interferometer. In particular, we discuss the d…
We demonstrate significant modification of the electron-phonon energy loss rate in a many-valley semiconductor system due to lattice mismatch induced strain. We show that the thermal conductance from the electron system to the phonon bath in strained n + Si, at phonon temperatures between 200 mK and 450 mK, is more than an order of magnitude lower than that for a similar unstrained sample.
Gyromagnetic Quantum Friction in Rayleigh Vorticity Baths
University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）；Kavli Institute for Theoretical Sciences, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学理论科学卡弗里研究所）；CAS Center for Excellence in Topological Quantum Computation, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学拓扑量子计算卓越创新中心）；Advanced Science Research Center, Japan Atomic Energy Agency（日本原子能研究开发机构先进科学研究中心）；RIKEN Center for Emergent Matter Science (CEMS)（理化学研究所新兴物质科学中心）；Institute for Solid State Physics, The University of Tokyo（东京大学固体物理研究所）；Department of Physics, Nagoya University（名古屋大学物理学系）；Center for Spintronics Research Network, Keio University（庆应义塾大学自旋电子学研究网络中心）；Faculty of Social Informatics, ZEN University（禅大学社会信息学部）；RIKEN Center for Quantum Computing（理化学研究所量子计算中心）；Department of Applied Physics, Hokkaido University（北海道大学应用物理学系）
We investigate pump-induced exciton inversion in a quantum-dot cavity system with continuous wave drive. Using a polaron-based master equation, we demonstrate excited-state populations above 0.9 for an InAs dot at a phonon bath temperature of 4K. In an exciton-driven system, the dominant mechanism is incoherent excitation from the phonon bath. For cavity driving, the mechanism is phonon-mediated switching between ground- and excited-state branches of the ladder of photon states, as quantum trajectory simulations clearly show. The exciton inversion as a function of detuning is found to be quali…
We study thermoelectric transport through a coherent molecular conductor connected to two electron and two phonon baths using the nonequilibrium Green's function method. We focus on the mutual drag between electron and phonon transport as a result of `momentum' transfer, which happens only when there are at least two phonon degrees of freedom. After deriving expressions for the linear drag coefficients, obeying the Onsager relation, we further investigate their effect on nonequilibrium transport. We show that the drag effect is closely related to two other phenomena: (1) adiabatic charge pumpi…
Based on the Frenkel-charge transfer (CT) mixing model of singlet fission (SF), we incorporate both the local and nonlocal phonon baths in the Hamiltonian and adopt the algorithm of time-dependent density matrix renormalization group to simulate the fission process in tetracene. The endergonic SF is found to be facilitated by the robust quantum coherence, which concurrently gives rise to a notable quantum beating effect. Controlled by the nonlocal electron-phonon coupling, the density of triplet yield manifests a nonlinear relationship with the singlet density. As a result, the fission rate in…
We present a detailed study of a phonon-assisted incoherent excitation mechanism of single quantum dots. A spectrally-detuned laser couples to a quantum dot transition by mediation of acoustic phonons, whereby excitation efficiencies up to 20 % with respect to strictly resonant excitation can be achieved at T = 9 K. Laser frequency-dependent analysis of the quantum dot intensity distinctly maps the underlying acoustic phonon bath and shows good agreement with our polaron master equation theory. An analytical solution for the photoluminescence is introduced which predicts a broadband incoherent…
We study theoretically the phonon-induced relaxation and decoherence processes in the hybrid qubit in silicon. Hybrid qubit behaves as a charge qubit when the detuning is close to zero and as spin qubit for large detuning values. It is realized starting from an electrostatically defined double quantum dot where three electrons are confined and manipulated through only electrical tuning. By employing a three-level effective model for the qubit and describing the environment bath as a series of harmonic oscillators in the thermal equilibrium states, we extract the relaxation and decoherence time…
We develop a quantum mechanical formalism to treat the strong coupling between an electromagnetic mode and a vibrational excitation of an ensemble of organic molecules. By employing a Bloch-Redfield-Wangsness approach, we show that the influence of dephasing-type interactions, i.e., elastic collisions with a background bath of phonons, critically depends on the nature of the bath modes. In particular, for long-range phonons corresponding to a common bath, the dynamics of the "bright state" (the collective superposition of molecular vibrations coupling to the cavity mode) is effectively decoupl…
Counter-rotating-wave terms (CRWTs) are traditionally viewed to be crucial in open small quantum systems with strong system-bath dissipation. Here by exemplifying in a nonequilibrium qubit-phonon hybrid model, we show that CRWTs can play the significant role in quantum heat transfer even with weak system-bath dissipation. By using coherent phonon states, we obtain the quantum master equation with heat exchange rates contributed by rotating-wave-terms (RWTs) and CRWTs, respectively. We find that including only RWTs, steady state heat current and current fluctuations will be significantly suppre…
We investigate the current noise of a charge qubit coupled to a phonon bath in different parameter regimes. We find, using the theory of Full Counting Statistics of non-Markovian systems, that the current fluctuations are strongly influenced by memory effects generated from the interplay between quantum coherence and the dynamics of the phonon bath.
We consider quantum error correction of quantum-noise that is created by a local interaction of qubits with a common bosonic bath. The possible exchange of bath bosons between qubits gives rise to spatial and temporal correlations in the noise. We find that these kind of noise correlations have a strong negative impact on quantum error correction.
Describing open quantum systems far from equilibrium is challenging, in particular when the environment is mesoscopic, when it develops nonequilibrium features during the evolution, or when the memory effects cannot be disregarded. Here, we derive a master equation that explicitly accounts for system-bath correlations and includes, at a coarse-grained level, a dynamically evolving bath. Such a master equation applies to a wide variety of physical systems including those described by Random Matrix Theory or the Eigenstate Thermalization Hypothesis. We obtain a local detailed balance condition w…
The time dynamics of the energy flow from electronic to lattice degrees of freedom in pump-probe setups could be strongly affected by the presence of a hot-phonon bottleneck, which can sustain longer coherence of the optically excited electronic states. Recently, hot-phonon physics has been experimentally observed and theoretically described in MgB$_2$, the electron-phonon based superconductor with $T_{\rm c}\approx 39$ K. By employing a combined ab-initio and quantum-field-theory approach and by taking MgB$_2$ as an example, here we propose a novel path for revealing the presence and characte…
A general form of a many-body Hamiltonian is considered, which includes an interacting fermionic sub-system coupled to non-interacting extended fermionic and bosonic systems. We show that the exact dynamics of the extended bosonic system can be derived from the reduced density matrix of the sub-system alone, despite the fact that the latter contains information about the sub-system only. The advantage of the formalism is immediately clear: While the reduced density matrix of the sub-system is readily available, the formalism offers access to observables contained in the full density matrix, wh…
The ultralow thermal conductivity $κ$ observed experimentally in intentionally roughened silicon nanowires (SiNWs) is reproduced in phonon Monte Carlo simulations with exponentially correlated real-space rough surfaces similar to measurement [J. Lim, K. Hippalgaonkar, S. C. Andrews, A. Majumdar, and P. Yang, Nano Lett. 12, 2475 (2012)]. Universal features of thermal transport are revealed by presenting $κ$ as a function of the normalized geometric mean free path $\barλ$ ($0<\barλ<1$); the diffusive (Casimir) limit corresponds to $\barλ=1/2$. $κ$ vs $\barλ$ is exponential at low-to-moderate rou…
The spontaneous emission rate of a quantum dot coupled to a structured photonic reservoir is determined by the frequency dependence of its local density of photon states. Through phonon-dressing, a breakdown of Fermi's golden rule can occur for certain photonic structures whose photon decay time become comparable to the longitudinal acoustic phonon decay times. We present a polaron master equation model to calculate the photoluminescence intensity from a coherently excited quantum dot coupled to a structured photonic reservoir. We consider examples of a semiconductor microcavity and a coupled …
We investigate the quantum annealing of the ferromagnetic $ p $-spin model in a dissipative environment ($ p = 5 $ and $ p = 7 $). This model, in the large $ p $ limit, codifies the Grover's algorithm for searching in an unsorted database. The dissipative environment is described by a phonon bath in thermal equilibrium at finite temperature. The dynamics is studied in the framework of a Lindblad master equation for the reduced density matrix describing only the spins. Exploiting the symmetries of our model Hamiltonian, we can describe many spins and extrapolate expected trends for large $ N $,…
We derive an extension to the quantum regression theorem which facilitates the calculation of two-time correlation functions and emission spectra for systems undergoing non-Markovian evolution. The derivation exploits projection operator techniques, with which we obtain explicit equations of motion for the correlation functions, making only a second order expansion in the system--environment coupling strength, and invoking the Born approximation at a fixed initial time. The results are used to investigate a driven semiconductor quantum dot coupled to an acoustic phonon bath, where we find the …
Recently proposed classical analogs of topological insulators in phononic lattices have the advantage of much more accessible experimental realization as compared to conventional materials. Drawn to their potential practical structural applications, we investigate how disorder, which is generically non-negligible in macroscopic realization, can attenuate the topologically protected edge (TPE) modes that constitute robust transmitting channels at zero disorder. We simulate the transmission of phonon modes in a quasi-one-dimensional classical lattice waveguide with mass disorder, and show that t…
We demonstrate that identical impurities immersed in a two-dimensional many-particle bath can be viewed as flux-tube-charged-particle composites described by fractional statistics. In particular, we find that the bath manifests itself as an external magnetic flux tube with respect to the impurities, and hence the time-reversal symmetry is broken for the effective Hamiltonian describing the impurities. The emerging flux tube acts as a statistical gauge field after a certain critical coupling. This critical coupling corresponds to the intersection point between the quasiparticle state and the ph…
External driving is emerging as a promising tool for exploring new phases in quantum systems. The intrinsically non-equilibrium states that result, however, are challenging to describe and control. We study the steady states of a periodically driven one-dimensional electronic system, including the effects of radiative recombination, electron-phonon interactions, and the coupling to an external fermionic reservoir. Using a kinetic equation for the populations of the Floquet eigenstates, we show that the steady-state distribution can be controlled using the momentum and energy relaxation pathway…
