We investigate pairwise quantum correlation as measured by the quantum discord as well as its classical counterpart in the thermodynamic limit of anisotropic XY spin-1/2 chains in a transverse magnetic field for both zero and finite temperatures. Analytical expressions for both classical and quantum correlations are obtained for spin pairs at any distance. In the case of zero temperature, it is shown that the quantum discord for spin pairs farther than second-neighbors is able to characterize a quantum phase transition, even though pairwise entanglement is absent for such distances. For finite temperatures, we show that quantum correlations can be increased with temperature in the presence of a magnetic field. Moreover, in the XX limit, the thermal quantum discord is found to be dominant over classical correlation while the opposite scenario takes place for the transverse field Ising model limit.
The nonzero ground-state energy of the quantum mechanical harmonic oscillator implies quantum fluctuations around the minimum of the potential with the mean square value proportional to Planck's constant. In classical mechanics thermal fluctuations occur when the oscillator is coupled to a heat bath of temperature $T$. At finite temperature quantum statistical mechanics allows the description of the transition from pure quantum fluctuations at $T=0$ to classical thermal fluctuations in the high temperature limit. It was early pointed out by Peierls that the mean square thermal fluctuations in …
In traditional thermodynamics, temperature is a local quantity: a subsystem of a large thermal system is in a thermal state at the same temperature as the original system. For strongly interacting systems, however, the locality of temperature breaks down. We study the possibility of associating an effective thermal state to subsystems of infinite chains of interacting spin particles of arbitrary finite dimension. We study the effect of correlations and criticality in the definition of this effective thermal state and discuss the possible implications for the classical simulation of thermal qua…
We generalize the method of third quantization to a unified exact treatment of Redfield and Lindblad master equations for open quadratic systems of n fermions in terms of diagonalization of 4n x 4n matrix. Non-equilibrium thermal driving in terms of the Redfield equation is analyzed in detail. We explain how to compute all physically relevant quantities, such as non-equilibrium expectation values of local observables, various entropies or information measures, or time evolution and properties of relaxation. We also discuss how to exactly treat explicitly time dependent problems. The general fo…
We study the nonequilibrium dynamics of the Quantum Ising Model following an abrupt quench of the transverse field. We focus on the on-site autocorrelation function of the order parameter, and extract the phase coherence time $τ^ϕ_Q$ from its asymptotic behavior. We show that the initial state determines $τ^ϕ_Q$ only through an effective temperature set by its energy and the final Hamiltonian. Moreover, we observe that the dependence of $τ^ϕ_Q$ on the effective temperature fairly agrees with that obtained in thermal equilibrium as a function of the equilibrium temperature.
We study the effect of thermal fluctuations in a recently proposed protocol for transmission of unknown quantum states through quantum spin chains. We develop a low temperature expansion for general spin chains. We then apply this formalism to study exactly thermal effects on short spin chains of four spins. We show that optimal times for extraction of output states are almost independent of the temperature which lowers only the fidelity of the channel. Moreover we show that thermal effects are smaller in the anti-ferromagnetic chains than the ferromagnetic ones.
Within the emerging field of quantum thermodynamics the issues of heat transfer and heat rectification are basic ingredients for the understanding and design of heat engines or refrigerators at nanoscales. Here, a consistent and versatile approach for mesoscopic devices operating with continuous degrees of freedom is developed valid from low up to strong system-reservoir couplings and over the whole temperature range. It allows to cover weak to moderate nonlinearities and is applicable to various scenarios including the presence of disorder and external time-dependent fields. As a particular a…
We study thermalization in a one-dimensional quantum system consisting of a noninteracting fermionic chain with each site of the chain coupled to an additional bath site. Using a density matrix renormalization group algorithm we investigate the time evolution of observables in the chain after a quantum quench. For low densities we show that the intermediate time dynamics can be quantitatively described by a system of coupled equations of motion. For higher densities our numerical results show a prethermalization for local observables at intermediate times and a full thermalization to the grand…
We find that quantum teleportation, using the thermally entangled state of two-qubit Heisenberg XX chain as a resource, with fidelity better than any classical communication protocol is possible. However, a thermal state with a greater amount of thermal entanglement does not necessarily yield better fidelity. It depends on the amount of mixing between the separable state and maximally entangled state in the spectra of the two-qubit Heisenberg XX model.
We address the problem of heat transport in a chain of coupled quantum harmonic oscillators, exposed to the influences of local environments of various nature, stressing the effects that the specific nature of the environment has on the phenomenology of the transport process. We study in detail the behavior of thermodynamically relevant quantities such as heat currents and mean energies of the oscillators, establishing rigorous analytical conditions for the existence of a steady state, whose features we analyse carefully. In particular we assess the conditions that should be faced to recover t…
We study thermalization and non-equilibrium dynamics in a dissipative quantum many-body system -- a chain of ions with two points of the chain driven by thermal bath under different temperature. Instead of a simple linear temperature gradient as one expects from the classical heat diffusion process, the temperature distribution in the ion chain shows surprisingly rich patterns, which depend on the ion coupling rate to the bath, the location of the driven ions, and the dissipation rates of the other ions in the chain. Through simulation of the temperature evolution, we show that these unusual t…
We investigate the quantum correlation in a qutrit-qubit mixed spin chain based on measurement-induced disturbance (MID) [S. Luo, Phys. Rev. A, 77, (2008) 022301]. We also compare MID and thermal entanglement measured by negativity and illustrate their different characteristics.
We study thermal quantum discord (TQD) in the Heisenberg chain with spin site or magnetic impurity. The former one of which may induce inhomogeneous exchange interactions between the neighboring spins, while the latter one modelling a spin chain with nonuniform magnetic field. In contrast with one's traditional understanding, we found that the spin impurity can be used to enhance the TQD greatly for all the bipartition schemes of the chain, while the magnetic impurity located on one spin can make the TQD between the other two spins approaching its maximum 1 for the antiferromagnetic chain.
A formula to evaluate the entanglement in an one-dimensional ferrimagnetic system is derived. Based on the formula, we find that the thermal entanglement in a small size spin-1/2 and spin-s ferrimagnetic chain is rather robust against temperature, and the threshold temperature may be arbitrarily high when s is sufficiently large. This intriguing result answers unambiguously a fundamental question: ``can entanglement and quantum behavior in physical systems survive at arbitrary high temperatures?"
he thermal entanglement is generated by weakly interacting atoms with an isotropic spin-1 chain. The decoherence of the entanglement is mainly investigated. The effective Hamiltonian is analytically obtained by the approximation method of perturbation. The scaling behavior of the effective coupling is numerically illustrated by the exact diagonalization. It is found out that the decay of the entanglement is slow in the case of non interacting spins. The long-distance thermal entangled states can be used as the noisy channel for the achievement of the quantum teleportation.
Thermal entanglement of a two-qubit Heisenberg chain in presence of the Dzyaloshinski-Moriya (DM) anisotropic antisymmetric interaction and entanglement teleportation when using two independent Heisenberg chains as quantum channel are investigated. It is found that the DM interaction can excite the entanglement and teleportation fidelity. The output entanglement increases linearly with increasing value of input one, its dependences on the temperature, DM interaction and spin coupling constant are given in detail. Entanglement teleportation will be better realized via antiferromagnetic spin cha…
We study quantum correlations and complexity of simulation, characterized by quantum mutual information and entanglement entropy in operator space respectively, for thermal states in critical, non-critical and quantum chaotic spin chains. A simple general relation between the two quantities is proposed. We show that in all cases mutual information and entanglement entropy saturate with the system size, whereas as a function of the inverse temperature, we find logarithmic divergences for critical cases and uniform bounds in non-critical cases. A simple efficient quasi-exact method for computati…
We study the two qubits Heisenberg XX chain with magnetic impurity in the presence of the external magnetic field and calculate the optimal fidelity of standard teleportation via the thermal equilibrium state. It is found that the combined influence of magnetic impurity and external magnetic field can increase the critical temperatures of entanglement and quantum teleportation without limit. The relation between two kinds of critical temperatures is revealed.
Many phases of matter, including superconductors, fractional quantum Hall fluids and spin liquids, are described by gauge theories with constrained Hilbert spaces. However, thermalization and the applicability of quantum statistical mechanics has primarily been studied in unconstrained Hilbert spaces. In this article, we investigate whether constrained Hilbert spaces permit local thermalization. Specifically, we explore whether the eigenstate thermalization hypothesis (ETH) holds in a pinned Fibonacci anyon chain, which serves as a representative case study. We first establish that the constra…
Most of the work involving entanglement measurement focuses on systems that can be modeled by two interacting qubits. This is due to the fact that there are few studies presenting entanglement analytical calculations in systems with spins $s > 1/2$. In this paper we present for the first time an analytical way of calculating thermal entanglement in a dimension $2\otimes3$ Heisenberg chain through the distance between states. We use the Hilbert-Schmidt norm to obtain entanglement. The result obtained can be used to calculate entanglement in chains with spin-$1/2$ coupling with spin-$1$, such as…
An exact description of integrable spin chains at finite temperature is provided using an elementary algebraic approach in the complete Hilbert space of the system. We focus on spin chain models that admit a description in terms of free fermions, including paradigmatic examples such as the one-dimensional transverse-field quantum Ising and XY models. The exact partition function is derived and compared with the ubiquitous approximation in which only the positive parity sector of the energy spectrum is considered. Errors stemming from this approximation are identified in the neighborhood of the…
The dynamics of a chain of three spins coupled at both ends to separate bosonic baths at different temperatures is studied. An exact analytical so- lution of the master equation in the Born-Markov approximation for the reduced density matrix of the chain is constructed. It is shown that for long times the reduced density matrix converges to the non-equilibrium steady- state. Dynamical and steady state properties of the concurrence between the first and the last spin are studied.
Thermal entanglement of a two-qubit Ising chain subjected to an external magnetic field and Dzialoshinski-Moriya (DM) interaction is examined. The effect of magnetic field, strength of DM interaction and temperature are analyzed by adopting negativity of partial transpose as the measure of entanglement. It is shown that when the DM interaction along the Ising axis is considerable, thermal entanglement can be sustained for higher temperature. The usefulness of longitudinal DM interaction over the one that is perpendicular to the Ising axis, in the manipulation and control of entanglement at a f…
We investigate the non-equilibrium thermal quantum discord and entanglement of a three-spin chain whose two end spins are respectively coupled to two thermal reservoirs at different temperatures. In the three-spin chain, besides the XX-type nearest-neighbor two-spin interaction, a multi-spin interaction is also considered and a homogenous magnetic field is applied to each spin. We show that the extreme steady-state quantum discord and entanglement of the two end spins can always be created by holding both a large magnetic field and a strong multi-spin interaction. The results are explained by …
The entanglement in a general Heisenberg antiferromagnetic chain of arbitrary spin-$s$ is investigated. The entanglement is witnessed by the thermal energy which equals to the minimum energy of any separable state. There is a characteristic temperature below that an entangled thermal state exists. The characteristic temperature for thermal entanglement is increased with spin $s$. When the total number of lattice is increased, the characteristic temperature decreases and then approaches a constant. This effect shows that the thermal entanglement can be detected in a real solid state system of l…
Harmonic oscillator chains connecting two harmonic reservoirs at different constant temperatures cannot act as thermal diodes, irrespective of structural asymmetry. However, here we prove that perfectly harmonic junctions can rectify heat once the reservoirs (described by white Langevin noise) are placed under temperature gradients, which are asymmetric at the two sides, an effect that we term "temperature-gradient harmonic oscillator diodes". This nonlinear diode effect results from the additional constraint -- the imposed thermal gradient at the boundaries. We demonstrate the rectification b…
The thermal entanglement in a two-qubit Heisenberg \emph{XXZ} spin chain is investigated under an inhomogeneous magnetic field \emph{b}. We show that the ground-state entanglement is independent of the interaction of \emph{z}-component $J_{z}$. The thermal entanglement at the fixed temperature can be enhanced when $J_{z}$ increases. We strictly show that for any temperature \emph{T} and $J_{z}$ the entanglement is symmetric with respect to zero inhomogeneous magnetic field, and the critical inhomogeneous magnetic field $b_{c}$ is independent of $J_{z}$. The critical magnetic field $B_{c}$ incr…
We study multipartite correlations and non-locality in an isotropic Ising ring under transverse magnetic field at both zero and finite temperature. We highlight parity-induced differences between the multipartite Bell-like functions used in order to quantify the degree of non-locality within a ring state and reveal a mechanism for the passive protection of multipartite quantum correlations against thermal spoiling effects that is clearly related to the macroscopic properties of the ring model.
In this work we analyze the simultaneous emergence of diffusive energy transport and local thermalization in a nonequilibrium one-dimensional quantum system, as a result of integrability breaking. Specifically, we discuss the local properties of the steady state induced by thermal boundary driving in a XXZ spin chain with staggered magnetic field. By means of efficient large-scale matrix product simulations of the equation of motion of the system, we calculate its steady state in the long-time limit.We start by discussing the energy transport supported by the system, finding it to be ballistic…
This preprint contains the English translation of the paper "Relaxation dynamics of a quantum chain of harmonic oscillators", which was published by the author in 1980 in the Ukrainian Physical Journal. Comments describing its motivations, background ideas and results are presented as well. This paper addressed to the problem of approach to the thermal equilibrium in an isolated macroscopic quantum system, which was studied on the example of the quantum chain of weakly interacting harmonic oscillators. In the initial state, macroscopic energy was supplied to one oscillator (atom) in the chain.…
The unitary time evolution of a critical quantum spin chain with an impurity is calculated, and the entanglement evolution is shown. Moreover, we show that the reduced density matrix of a part of the chain evolves such that the fidelity of its spectrum is very high with respect to a state in thermal equilibrium. Hence, a thermal state occurs through unitary time evolution in a simple spin chain with impurity.
We investigate entanglement in a linear chain of $N$ polar molecules coupled by dipole interaction. In our model, nearest neighbour interaction predominate, and we compute entanglement with the help of a two-party correlation entanglement measure. We find that, in this system, only excited states are entangled. Moreover, when an electrostatic field is applied, energy levels crossings occur, changing significantly the system's entanglement properties. We make a systematic study of the entanglement dependency on the inter molecular distance separating pairs of molecules, different partitions of …
In this paper we consider the generation of a three-qubit GHZ-like thermal state by applying the entanglement swapping scheme of Zukowski {\it et al.} [Ann. N. Y. Acad. Sci. {\bf 755}, 91 (1995)] to three pairs of two-qubit Heisenberg XY chains. The quality of the resulting three-qubit entanglement is studied by analyzing the teleportation fidelity, when it is used as a resource in the teleportation protocol of Karlsson {\it et al.}[Phys. Rev. A {\bf 58}, 4394 (1998)]. We show that even though thermal noise in the original two-qubit states is amplified by the entanglement swapping process, we …
The concurrence of two alternate qubits in a four-qubit Heisenberg XX chain is investigated when a uniform magnetic field B is included. It is found that there is no thermal entanglement between alternate qubits if B is close to zero. Magnetic field can induce entanglement in a certain range both for the antiferromagnetic and ferromagnetic cases. Near zero temperature, the entanglement undergoes two sudden changes with increasing value of the magnetic field B. This is due to the changes in the ground state. This novel property may be used as quantum entanglement switch. The anisotropy in the s…
We establish a solvable Heisenberg-Ising model on a spin-1 Ni-containing polymer chain, $[Ni (NN'-dmen) (μ-N_3)_2]$, with $NN'-dmen$ being $NN'-dimethylethylenediamine$, that fully covers the interaction characteristics of the material and by which, we can characterize all the peculiar magnetic features of the polymer, which has been partly studied in experiment. By purely analytical calculations, we can see that the magnetization exhibits three plateaus at zero, mid, and 3/4 of the saturation value at low temperatures below 2 K. The corresponding featuring peaks of magnetic susceptibility are…
We study the optimal teleportation based on Bell measurements via the thermal states of a two-qubit Heisenberg XXX chain in the presence of Dzyaloshinsky-Moriya (DM) anisotropic antisymmetric interaction and obtain the optimal unitary transformation. The explicit expressions of the output state and the teleportation fidelity are presented and compared with those of the standard protocol. It is shown that in this protocol the teleportation fidelity is always larger and unit fidelity is achieved at zero temperature. The DM interaction can enhance the teleportation fidelity at finite temperatures…
The thermal entanglement in Heisenberg $XYZ$ chain is investigated in the presence of external magnetic field $B$. In the two-qubit system, the critical magnetic field $B_c$ is increased because of introducing the interaction of the z-component of two neighboring spins $J_z$. This interaction not only improves the critical temperature $T_c,$ but also enhances the entanglement for particular fixed $B$. We also analyze the pairwise entanglement between nearest neighbors in three qubits. The pairwise entanglement, for a fixed $T$, can be strong by controlling $B$ and $J_z$. PACS: 03.65. Ud, 03.67…
We study the local thermal entanglement in a spin-1/2 Ising-$XXZ$ diamond structure with two impurities. In this spin chain, we have the two impurities with an isolated $XXZ$ dimer between them. We focus on the study of the thermal entanglement in this dimer. The main goal of this paper is to provide a good understanding of the effect of impurities in the entanglement of the model. This model is exactly solved by a rigorous treatment based on the transfer-matrix method. Our results show that the entanglement can be tuned by varying the impurities parameters in this system. In addition, it is s…
The effects of an impurity plaquette on the thermal quantum correlations measurement by the concurrence, on the quantum coherence quantified by the recently proposed $l_{1}$-norm of coherence and on the quantum teleportation in a Ising-$XXZ$ diamond chain are discussed. Such an impurity is formed by the XXZ interaction between the interstitial Heisenberg dimers and the nearest-neighbor Ising coupling between the nodal and interstitial spins. All the interaction parameters are different from those of the rest of the chain. By tailoring them, the quantum entanglement and quantum coherence can be…
Quantum communications require efficient implementations of quantum state transportation with high fidelity. Here, we consider the transport of entanglement along a chain of qubits. A series of SWAP operations involving successive pairs of qubits can transport entanglement along the chain. We report that the fidelity of the abovementioned gate has a maximum value corresponding to an optimum value of the drive amplitude in the presence of drive-induced decoherence. To incorporate environmental effect, we use a previously reported fluctuation-regulated quantum master equation [A. Chakrabarti and…
We study a chain of alternating hot and cold electronic nanocavities -- connected to one another via resonant-tunneling quantum dots -- with the intent of achieving precise thermal control across the chain. This is accomplished by positioning the dots' energy levels such that a predetermined distribution of heat currents is realized across the chain in the steady state. The number of electrons in each cavity is conserved in the steady state which constrains the cavities' chemical potentials. We determine these chemical potentials analytically in the linear response regime where the energy diff…
We investigate the entanglement properties of a one dimensional chain of spin qubits coupled via nearest neighbor interactions. The entanglement measure used is the n-concurrence, which is distinct from other measures on spin chains such as bipartite entanglement in that it can quantify "global" entanglement across the spin chain. Specifically, it computes the overlap of a quantum state with its time-reversed state. As such this measure is well suited to study ground states of spin chain Hamiltonians that are intrinsically time reversal symmetric. We study the robustness of n-concurrence of gr…
The thermal pairwise entanglement (TE) of the S=1/2 XY chain in a transverse magnetic field is exactly resolved by means of the Jordan-Wigner transformation. It is found that the TE vanishes at a common temperature Tc~0.4843J, which is irrelevant to the field. A thermal quantity is proposed to witness the entangled state. Furthermore, the TE of the S=1/2 antiferromagnetic-ferromagnetic (AF-F) Heisenberg chain is studied by the transfer-matrix renormalization group method.The TEs of the spins coupled by AF and F interactions are found to behave distinctively. The vanishing temperature of the fi…
In order to explore the effect of external temperature $T$ in quantum correlation we compute thermal entanglement and thermal discord analytically in the Heisenberg $X$ $Y$ $Z$ model with Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya Interaction term ${\bm D} \cdot \left( {\bm σ}_1 \times {\bm σ}_2 \right)$. For the case of thermal entanglement it is shown that quantum phase transition occurs at $T = T_c$ due to sudden death phenomenon. For antiferromagnetic case the critical temperature $T_c$ increases with increasing $|{\bm D}|$. For ferromagnetic case, however, $T_c$ exhibits different behavior in the regions $|{\…
Entanglement properties of excited eigenstates (or of thermal mixed states) are difficult to study with conventional analytical methods. We approach this problem for random spin chains using a recently developed real-space renormalization group technique for excited states ("RSRG-X"). For the random $XX$ and quantum Ising chains, which have logarithmic divergences in the entanglement entropy of their (infinite-randomness) critical ground states, we show that the entanglement entropy of excited eigenstates retains a logarithmic divergence while the mutual information of thermal mixed states doe…
Ultracold polar molecules, in highly anisotropic traps and interacting via a repulsive dipolar potential, may form one-dimensional chains at high densities. According to classical theory, at low temperatures there exists a critical value of the density at which a second order phase transition from a linear to a zigzag chain occurs. We study the effect of thermal and quantum fluctuations on these self-organized structures using classical and quantum Monte Carlo methods, by means of which we evaluate the pair correlation function and the static structure factor. Depending on the parameters, thes…
In this work we analyze the quantum correlations in a spin-1/2 Ising-XXZ diamond chain with one plaquette distorted impurity. We have shown that the introduction of impurity into the chain can significantly increase entanglement as well as quantum correlations compared to the original model, without impurity. Due to the great flexibility in the choice of impurity parameters, the model presented is very general and this fact can be very useful for future experimental measurements. In addition to entanglement and quantum coherence, we studied quantum teleportation through a quantum channel compo…
