A possible definition of the specific heat of open quantum systems is based on the reduced partition function of the system. For a free damped quantum particle, it has been found that under certain conditions, this specific heat can become negative at low temperatures. In contrast to the conventional approaches focusing on the system degree of freedom, here we concentrate on the changes induced in the environment when the system is coupled to it. Our analysis is carried out for an Ohmic environment consisting of harmonic oscillators and allows to identify the mechanism by which the specific heat becomes negative. Furthermore, the formal condition for the occurrence of a negative specific heat is given a physical interpretation in terms of the total mass of bath oscillators and the system mass.
We solve the optimal quantum limit of probing a classical force exactly by a damped oscillator initially prepared in the factorized squeezed state. The memory effects of the thermal bath on the oscillator evolution are investigated. We show that the optimal force sensitivity obtained by the quantum estimation theory approaches to zero for the non-Markovian bath, whereas approaches to a finite non-zero value for the Markovian bath as the energy of the damped oscillator goes to infinity.
Time evolution of a harmonic oscillator linearly coupled to a heat bath is compared for three classes of initial states for the bath modes - grand canonical ensemble, number states and coherent states. It is shown that for a wide class of number states the behavior of the oscillator is similar to the case of the equilibrium bath. If the bath modes are initially in coherent states, then the variances of the oscillator coordinate and momentum, as well as its entanglement to the bath, asymptotically approach the same values as for the oscillator at zero temperature and the average coordinate and …
The energy of the bosonic bath and the flow of quantum information are analyzed over short and long times in local dephasing channels for special correlated or factorized initial conditions, respectively, which involve thermal states. The continuous distribution of frequency modes of the bosonic bath exhibits a spectral gap over low frequencies. The bath energy shows oscillatory behaviors around the asymptotic value and information is alternatively lost and gained by the open system. Due to the low-frequency gap, the damped oscillations become regular over long times and the frequency of the o…
We derive an exact non-Markovian master equation that generalizes the previous work [Hu, Paz and Zhang, Phys. Rev. D {\bf 45}, 2843 (1992)] to damped harmonic oscillators with time-varying parameters. This is achieved by exploiting the linearity of the system and operator solution in Heisenberg picture. Our equation governs the non-Markovian quantum dynamics when the system is modulated by external devices. As an application, we apply our equation to parity kick decoupling problems. The time-dependent dissipative coefficients in the master equation are shown to be modified drastically when the…
In the framework of the Lindblad theory for open quantum systems, a master equation for the quantum harmonic oscillator interacting with a dissipative environment, in particular with a thermal bath, is derived for the case when the interaction is based on deformed algebra. The equations of motion for observables strongly depend on the deformation function. The expectation values of the number operator and squared number operator are calculated in the limit of a small deformation parameter for the case of zero temperature of the thermal bath. The steady state solution of the equation for the de…
We model a quantum system coupled to an environment of damped harmonic oscillators by following the approach of Caldeira-Leggett and adopting the Caldirola-Kanai Lagrangian for the bath oscillators. In deriving the master equation of the quantum system of interest (a particle in a general potential), we show that the potential is modified non-trivially by a new inverted harmonic oscillator term, induced by the damping of the bath oscillators. We analyze numerically the case of a particle in a double-well potential, and find that this modification changes both the rate of decoherence at short t…
The interrelationship between the non-Markovian stochastic Schrödinger equations and the corresponding non-Markovian master equations is investigated in the finite temperature regimes. We show that the general finite temperature non-Markovian trajectories can be used to derive the corresponding non-Markovian master equations. A simple, yet important solvable example is the well-known damped harmonic oscillator model in which a harmonic oscillator is coupled to a finite temperature reservoir in the rotating wave approximation. The exact convolutionless master equation for the damped harmonic os…
There is presently considerable interest in accurately simulating the evolution of open systems for which Markovian master equations fail. Examples are systems that are time-dependent and/or strongly damped. A number of elegant methods have now been devised to do this, but all use a bath consisting of a continuum of harmonic oscillators. While this bath is clearly appropriate for, e.g., systems coupled to the EM field, it is not so clear that it is a good model for generic many-body systems. Here we explore a different approach to exactly simulating open-systems: using a finite bath chosen to …
We study the asymptotic entanglement of two quantum harmonic oscillators nonlinearly coupled to an environment. Coupling to independent baths and a common bath are investigated. Numerical results obtained using the Wangsness-Bloch-Redfield method are supplemented by analytical results in the rotating wave approximation. The asymptotic negativity as function of temperature, initial squeezing and coupling strength, is compared to results for systems with linear system-reservoir coupling. We find that due to the parity conserving nature of the coupling, the asymptotic entanglement is considerably…
The phase-space path-integral approach to the damped harmonic oscillator is analyzed beyond the Markovian approximation. It is found that pairs of nonclassical trajectories contribute to the path-integral representation of the Wigner propagating function. Due to the linearity of the problem, the sum coordinate of a pair still satisfies the classical equation of motion. Furthermore, it is shown that the broadening of the Wigner propagating function of the damped oscillator arises due to the time-nonlocal interaction mediated by the heat bath.
In the framework of the Lindblad theory for open quantum systems, we determine the degree of quantum decoherence of a harmonic oscillator interacting with a thermal bath. It is found that the system manifests a quantum decoherence which is more and more significant in time. We also calculate the decoherence time and show that it has the same scale as the time after which thermal fluctuations become comparable with quantum fluctuations.
For a free particle, the coupling to its environment can be the relevant mechanism to induce quantum behavior as the temperature is lowered. We study general linear environments with a spectral density proportional to ω^s at low frequencies and consider in particular the specific heat of the free damped particle. For super-Ohmic baths with s>=2, a reentrant classical behavior is found. As the temperature is lowered, the specific heat decreases from the classical value of k_B/2, thereby indicating the appearence of quantum effects. However, the classical value of the specific heat is restored a…
The quantum dynamics of a damped harmonic oscillator is investigated in the presence of an anisotropic heat bath. The medium is modeled by a continuum of three dimensional harmonic oscillators and anisotropic coupling is treated by introducing tensor coupling functions. Starting from a classical Lagrangian, the total system is quantized in the framework of the canonical quantization. Following Fano technique, Hamiltonian of the system is diagonalized in terms of creation and annihilation operators that are linear combinations of the basic dynamical variables. Using the diagonalized Hamiltonian…
The dynamics of a qubit in two different environments are investigated theoretically. The first environment is a two level system coupled to a bosonic bath. And the second one is a damped harmonic oscillator. Based on a unitary transformation, we find that the decoherence of the qubit can be reduced with increasing temperature $T$ in the first case, which agree with the results in [Phys. Rev. Lett. 100, 120401], whereas, it can not be reduced with $T$ in the second case. In both cases, the qubit dynamics are changed substantially as the coupling increases or finite detuning appears.
In a recent paper Dajka, et.al., [J. Phys. A \textbf{40}, F879 (2007)] predicted that some composite systems can be entangled forever even if coupled with a thermal bath. We analyze the transient entanglement of a single-Cooper-pair box biased by a classical voltage and irradiated by a quantized field and find the unusual feature that the phase-damped cavity can lead to a long-lived entanglement. The results show an asymptotic value of the idempotency defect (concurrence) which embodies coherence loss (entanglement survival), independent of the interaction development by dependent critically o…
We consider two chains, each made of $N$ independent oscillators, immersed in a common thermal bath and study the dynamics of their mutual quantum correlations in the thermodynamic, large-$N$ limit. We show that dissipation and noise due to the presence of the external environment are able to generate collective quantum correlations between the two chains at the mesoscopic level. The created collective quantum entanglement between the two many-body systems turns out to be rather robust, surviving for asymptotically long times even for non vanishing bath temperatures.
We investigate the exact dynamics of the damped quantum harmonic oscillator under the (un)correlated initial conditions. The master equation is generalized to the cases of the arbitrary factorized state and/or Gaussian state. We show that the variances of the factorized Gaussian state do not sensitively depend on the initial oscillator-bath correlation, which however can remarkably affect the mean values even at high temperature. We also illustrate that the correlations among the factorized states still give rise to the initial dips during the purity evolutions, which can be smoothed out by in…
Using the exact path integral solution for the damped harmonic oscillator it is shown that in general there does not exist an exact dissipative Liouville operator describing the dynamics of the oscillator for arbitrary initial bath preparations. Exact non-stationary Liouville operators can be found only for particular preparations. Three physically meaningful examples are examined. An exact new master equation is derived for thermal initial conditions. Second, the Liouville operator governing the time-evolution of equilibrium correlations is obtained. Third, factorizing initial conditions are …
The evaluation of the specific heat of an open, damped quantum system is a subtle issue. One possible route is based on the thermodynamic partition function which is the ratio of the partition functions of system plus bath and of the bath alone. For the free damped particle it has been shown, however, that the ensuing specific heat may become negative for appropriately chosen environments. Being an open system this quantity then naturally must be interpreted as the change of the specific heat obtained as the difference between the specific heat of the heat bath coupled to the system degrees of…
We consider a spin-$j$ particle coupled to a structured bath of bosonic modes that decay into thermal baths. We obtain an analytic expression for the reduced spin state and use it to investigate non-Markovian spin dynamics. In the heavily overdamped regime, spin coherences are preserved due to a quantum Zeno affect. We extend the solution to two spins and include coupling between the modes, which can be leveraged for preservation of the symmetric spin subspace. For many spins, we find that inter-mode coupling gives rise to a privileged symmetric mode gapped from the other modes. This provides …
It is demonstrated that the general theory of Casimir and van der Waals forces describes the interaction-induced equilibrium thermodynamic potentials of the damped harmonic oscillator bilinearly coupled to the environment. An extended model for a damped oscillator is suggested along the lines of the general theory of Casimir and van der Waals forces, and the corresponding thermodynamic quantities obtained. While the original model involves a heat bath consisting of a large number of free oscillators having infinitesimal damping functions, the extended model allows any generally admissible freq…
We derive a master equation for a driven double-dot damped by an unstructured phonon bath, and calculate the spectral density. We find that bath mediated photon absorption is important at relatively strong driving, and may even dominate the dynamics, inducing population inversion of the double dot system. This phenomenon is consistent with recent experimental observations.
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.
To examine the loss of entanglement in a two-particle Gaussian system, we couple it to an environment and use the Non-Rotating Wave master equation to study the system's dynamics. We also present a derivation of this equation. We consider two different types of evolution. Under free evolution we find that entanglement is lost quickly between the particles. When a harmonic potential is added between the particles, two very different behaviours can be observed, namely in the over and under-damped cases respectively, where the strength of the damping is determined by how large the coupling to the…
We obtain analytic solutions to various models of dissipation of the quantum harmonic oscillator, employing a simple method in the Wigner function Fourier transform description of the system; and study as an exemplification, the driven open quantum harmonic oscillator. The environmental models we use are based on optical master equations for the zero and finite temperature bath and whose open dynamics are described by a Lindblad master equation, and also we use the Caldeira-Leggett model for the high temperature limit, in the the under damped an the over damped case. Under the Wigner Fourier t…
The dynamics of Davydov-Scott monomer in a thermal bath with higher order amide-site's displacement leads to anharmonic oscillation effect is investigated using full-quantum approach and the Lindblad formulation of master equation. The specific heat is calculated based on the thermodynamic partition function using the path integral method. The temperature dependence of the specific heat is studied. In the model the specific heat anomaly as pointed out in recent works by Ingold et.al is also observed. However it is found that the anomaly occurs at high temperature region, and the anharmonic osc…
To investigate a system coupled to a harmonic oscillator bath, we propose a new approach based on a phonon number representation of the bath. Compared to the method of the hierarchical equations of motion, the new approach is computationally much less expensive in a sense that a reduced density matrix is obtained by calculating the time evolution of vectors, instead of matrices, which enables one to deal with large dimensional systems. As a benchmark test, we consider a quantum damped harmonic oscillator, and show that the exact results can be well reproduced. In addition to the reduced densit…
We derive a quantum Langevin equation for a quantum spin in the presence of a magnetic field and study its dynamics in the Markovian limit using the Ohmic bath model. We extend our analysis to the Drude bath with a finite memory. We study the time evolution of the expectation values of the magnetic moments. The spin auto-correlation functions exhibit a damped oscillatory behaviour with the randomization time being determined by the damping rate and also the memory time for the Drude bath model. We also analyse the spin response function of the system for the Ohmic bath model. Our results are c…
We consider a quantum model of a nanomechanical flexing beam resonator interacting with a bath comprising a few damped tunneling two level systems (TLS's). In contrast with a resonator interacting bilinearly with an ohmic free oscillator bath (modeling clamping loss, for example), the mechanical resonator damping is amplitude dependent, while the decoherence of quantum superpositions of mechanical position states depends only weakly on their spatial separation.
In this paper it is shown that exact decoherence to minimal uncertainty Gaussian pointer states is generic for free quantum particles coupled to a heat bath. More specifically, the paper is concerned with damped free particles linearly coupled under product initial conditions to a heat bath at arbitrary temperature, with arbitrary coupling strength and spectral densities covering the Ohmic, subohmic, and supraohmic regime. Then it is true that there exists a time t_c such that for times t>t_c the state can always be exactly represented as a mixture (convex combination) of particular minimal un…
We develop a versatile master equation approach to describe the non-equilibrium dynamics of a two-level system in contact with a bosonic environment, which allows for the exploration of a wide range of parameter regimes within a single formalism. As an experimentally relevant example, we apply this technique to the study of excitonic Rabi rotations in a driven quantum dot, and compare its predictions to the numerical Feynman integral approach. We find excellent agreement between the two methods across a generally difficult range of parameters. In particular, the variational master equation tec…
A model of wave function collapse in a quantum measurement of spin as the Schroedinger equation solution of a system with a simple harmonic oscillator in a bath
A quantum damped-polariton model is constructed for an inhomogeneous anisotropic linear dielectric with arbitrary dispersion in space and time. The model Hamiltonian is completely diagonalized by determining the creation and annihilation operators for the fundamental polariton modes as specific linear combinations of the basic dynamical variables. Explicit expressions are derived for the time-dependent operators describing the electromagnetic field, the dielectric polarization and the noise term in the latter. It is shown how to identify bath variables that generate the dissipative dynamics of…
A free particle coupled to a heat bath can exhibit a number of thermodynamic anomalies like a negative specific heat or reentrant classicality. These low-temperature phenomena are expected to be modified at very low temperatures where finite-size effects associated with the discreteness of the energy spectrum become relevant. In this paper, we explore in which form the thermodynamic anomalies of the free damped particle appear for a damped harmonic oscillator. Since the discreteness of the oscillator's energy spectrum is fully accounted for, the results are valid for arbitrary temperatures. As…
Scalable simulation of non-Markovian quantum transport by stochastic-phase bath reduction
University of California, Berkeley（加州大学伯克利分校）；Flatiron Institute（平顿研究所）；Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory（劳伦斯伯克利国家实验室）；California Institute of Technology（加州理工学院）
We study the emergence of collective dynamics in the integrable Hamiltonian system of two finite ensembles of coupled harmonic oscillators. After identification of a collective degree of freedom, the Hamiltonian is mapped onto a model of Caldeira-Leggett type, where the collective coordinate is coupled to an internal bath of phonons. In contrast to the usual Caldeira-Leggett model, the bath in the present case is part of the system. We derive an equation of motion for the collective coordinate which takes the form of a damped harmonic oscillator. We show that the distribution of quantum transi…
A quantum system weakly interacting with a fast environment usually undergoes a relaxation with complex frequencies whose imaginary parts are damping rates quadratic in the coupling to the environment, in accord with Fermi's ``Golden Rule''. We show for various models (spin damped by harmonic-oscillator or random-matrix baths, quantum diffusion, quantum Brownian motion) that upon increasing the coupling up to a critical value still small enough to allow for weak-coupling Markovian master equations, a new relaxation regime can occur. In that regime, complex frequencies lose their real parts suc…
The quantum mechanical decay of two or more overlapped resonances in a common continuum is largely influenced by Fano interference, leading to important phenomena such as the existence of bound states in the continuum, fractional decay and quiescent dynamics for single particle decay, and signature of particle statistics in the many-body quantum decay. An overlooked yet essential requirement to observe Fano interference is time reversal symmetry of the bath. Here we consider multilevel quantum decay in a bath sustaining unidirectional (chiral) propagating states, such as in quantum Hall or in …
We investigate the dynamics of two quantum mechanical oscillator system-bath toy models obtained by truncating to zero spatial dimensions linearized gravity coupled to a massive scalar field and scalar QED. The scalar-gravity toy model maps onto the phase damped oscillator, while the scalar QED toy model approximately maps onto an oscillator system subject to two-photon damping. The toy models provide potentially useful insights into solving for open system quantum dynamics relevant to the full scalar QED and weak gravitational field systems, in particular operational probes of the decoherence…
A method for the systematic construction of few-body damped harmonic oscillator networks accurately reproducing the effect of general bosonic environments in open quantum systems is presented. Under the sole assumptions of a Gaussian environment and regardless of the system coupled to it, an algorithm to determine the parameters of an equivalent set of interacting damped oscillators obeying a Markovian quantum master equation is introduced. By choosing a suitable coupling to the system and minimizing an appropriate distance between the two-time correlation function of this effective bath and t…
We consider a free particle coupled with finite strength to a bath and investigate the evaluation of its specific heat. A harmonic oscillator bath of Drude type with cutoff frequency omega_D is employed to model an ohmic friction force with dissipation strength gamma. Two scenarios for obtaining specific heat are presented. The first one uses the measurement of the kinetic energy of the free particle while the second one is based on the reduced partition function. Both descriptions yield results which are consistent with the Third Law of thermodynamics. Nevertheless, the two methods produce di…
We construct a global Lindblad master equation for a Kitaev quantum wire of finite length, weakly coupled to an arbitrary number of thermal baths, within the Born-Markov and secular approximations. We find that the coupling of an external bath to more than one lattice site generates quantum interference effects, arising from the possibility of fermions to tunnel through multiple paths. In the presence of two baths at different temperatures and/or chemical potentials, the steady-state particle current can be expressed through the Landauer-Büttiker formula, as in a ballistic transport setup, wit…
A "microscopic" justification of the "symmetric damping" model of a quantum oscillator with time-dependent frequency and time-dependent damping is given. This model is used to predict results of experiments on simulating the dynamical Casimir effect in a cavity with a photo-excited semiconductor mirror. It is shown that the most general bilinear time-dependent coupling of a selected oscillator (field mode) to a bath of harmonic oscillators results in two equal friction coefficients for the both quadratures, provided all the coupling coefficients are proportional to a single arbitrary function …
We study the non-equilibrium dynamics of Axion-like particles (ALP) coupled to Standard Model degrees of freedom in thermal equilibrium. The Quantum Master Equation (QME) for the (ALP) reduced density matrix is derived to leading order in the coupling of the (ALP) to the thermal bath, but to \emph{all} orders of the bath couplings to degrees of freedom within or beyond the Standard Model other than the (ALP). The (QME) describes the damped oscillation dynamics of an initial misaligned (ALP) condensate, thermalization with the bath, decoherence and entropy production within a unifying framework…
We introduce a new analytical method for studying the open quantum systems problem of a discrete system weakly coupled to an environment of harmonic oscillators. Our approach is based on a phase space representation of the density matrix for a system coupled to a two-tiered environment. The dynamics of the system and its immediate environment are resolved in a non-Markovian way, and the environmental modes of the inner environment can themselves be damped by a wider `universe'. Applying our approach to the canonical cases of the Rabi and spin-boson models we obtain new analytical expressions f…
