Practical implementations of quantum technology are limited by unavoidable effects of decoherence and dissipation. With achieved experimental control for individual atoms and photons, more complex platforms composed by several units can be assembled enabling distinctive forms of dissipation and decoherence, in independent heat baths or collectively into a common bath, with dramatic consequences for the preservation of quantum coherence. The cross-over between these two regimes has been widely attributed in the literature to the system units being farther apart than the bath's correlation length. Starting from a microscopic model of a structured environment (a crystal) sensed by two bosonic probes, here we show the failure of such conceptual relation, and identify the exact physical mechanism underlying this cross-over, displaying a sharp contrast between dephasing and dissipative baths. Depending on the frequency of the system and, crucially, on its orientation with respect to the crystal axes, collective dissipation becomes possible for very large distances between probes, opening new avenues to deal with decoherence in phononic baths.
We use the microscopic derivation of the Jaynes-Cummings model master equation under field losses to study the dynamics of initial field states beyond the single-excitation manifold. We show that field-qubit detuning, as well as finite temperature, modify the effective decay rate in the model using entropy measures, like qubit-field purity and von Neumann entropy of the field, for initial Fock states. For initial semi-classical states of the field, we show that the microscopic approach, in phase space, provides an evolution to thermal equilibrium that is smoother than the one provided by the s…
Periodically driven closed quantum many-body systems are known to exhibit prethermal or quasi-steady-state dynamics. In this work, we theoretically show that such prethermal phases can appear in the dynamics of a dipolar two-spin-$1/2$ system coupled to a heat bath if the cross terms between the drive and dipolar interactions are taken into consideration. To this end, we use our recently-reported fluctuation-regulated quantum master equation [A. Chakrabarti and R. Bhattacharyya, Phys. Rev. A 97, 063837 (2018)], to show that the predicted dynamics can successfully explain the experimentally obs…
We present and discuss a general density-matrix description of energy-dissipation and decoherence phenomena in open quantum systems, able to overcome the intrinsic limitations of the conventional Markov approximation. In particular, the proposed alternative adiabatic scheme does not threaten positivity at any time. The key idea of our approach rests in the temporal symmetrization and coarse graining of the scattering term in the Liouville-von Neumann equation, before applying the reduction procedure over the environment degrees of freedom. The resulting dynamics is genuinely Lindblad-like and …
Progress in the creation of large scale, artificial quantum coherent structures demands the investigation of their nonequilibrium dynamics when strong interactions, even between remote parts, are non-perturbative. Analysis of multiparticle quantum correlations in a large system in the presence of decoherence and external driving is especially topical. Still, scaling behaviour of dynamics and related emergent phenomena are not yet well understood. We investigate how the dynamics of a driven system of several quantum elements (e.g., qubits or Rydberg atoms) changes with increasing number of elem…
A longstanding challenge in nonequilibrium thermodynamics is to predict the emergence of self-organized behaviours and functionalities typical of living matter. Despite the progress with classical complex systems, it remains far from obvious how to extrapolate these results down to the quantum scale. Here, we employ the paradigmatic master equation framework to establish that some lifelike behaviours and functionalities can indeed emerge in elementary dissipative quantum systems driven out of equilibrium. Specifically, we find both energy-avoiding (low steady dissipation) and energy-seeking be…
On this work, we consider a particle moving in front of a dielectric plate, and study two of the most relevant effects of the vacuum field fluctuations: the dissipation, and the decoherence of the particle's internal degrees of freedom. We consider the particle to follow a classical, macroscopically-fixed trajectory. To study the dissipative effects, we calculate the in-out effective action by functionally integrating over the vacuum field and the microscopic degrees of freedom of both the plate and the particle. This in-out effective action develops an imaginary part, hence a non-vanishing pr…
As a universal theory of physics, quantum mechanics must assign states to every level of description of a system -- from a full microscopic description, all the way up to an effective macroscopic characterization -- and also to describe the interconnections among them. Assuming that we only have a coarse-grained access to a physical system, here we show how to assign to it a microscopic description that abides by all macroscopic constraints. In order to do that, we employ general coarse-graining maps, allowing our approach to be used even when the split between system and environment is not ob…
To understand the dynamical origin of the measurement in quantum mechanics, several models have been put forward which have a quantum system coupled to an apparatus. The system and the apparatus evolve in time and the Born rule for the system to be in various eigenstates of the observable is naturally obtained. In this work, we show that the effect of the drive-induced dissipation in such a system can lead to the Born rule, even if there is no separate apparatus. The applied drive needs to be much stronger than the system-environment coupling. In this condition, we show that the dynamics of a …
Quantum information processing is in real systems often limited by dissipation, stemming from remaining uncontrolled interaction with microscopic degrees of freedom. Given recent experimental progress, we consider weak dissipation, resulting in a small error probability per operation. Here, we find a simple formula for the fidelity reduction of any desired quantum operation. Interestingly, this reduction is independent of the specific operation; it depends only on the operation time and the dissipation. Using our formula, we investigate the situation where dissipation in different parts of the…
Fluctuations of thermodynamic quantities become non-negligible and play an important role when the system size is small. We develop finite-time thermodynamics of fluctuations in microscopic heat engines whose environmental temperature and mechanical parameter are driven periodically in time. Within the slow-driving regime, this formalism universally holds in a coarse-grained time scale whose resolution is much longer than the correlation time of the fluctuations, and is shown to be consistent with the relation analogous to the fluctuation-dissipation relation. Employing a geometric argument, a…
A master equation for the deformed quantum harmonic oscillator interacting with a dissipative environment, in particular with a thermal bath, is derived in the microscopic model by using perturbation theory. The coefficients of the master equation and of equations of motion for observables depend on the deformation function. The steady state solution of the equation for the density matrix in the number representation is obtained and the equilibrium energy of the deformed harmonic oscillator is calculated in the approximation of small deformation.
We theoretically investigate a possibility to establish multi-qubit quantum correlations in one-dimensional chains of qubits. We combine a reservoir engineering strategy with coherent dynamics to generate multi-qubit entangled states. We find that an interplay between the coherent and incoherent dynamics result in the generation of stable (time-independent) many-body entangled steady states. Our results will be relevant in the context of the dissipative generation of quantum states, with applications in short-distance quantum computation and for exploring the emergence of collective phenomena …
We consider the claim that decoherence explains the emergence of classicality in quantum systems, and conclude that it does not. We show that, given a randomly chosen universe composed of a variety of subsystems, some of which are macroscopic and subject to decoherence-inducing interactions, and some of which are microscopic, the macroscopic subsystems will not display any distinctively classical behavior. Therefore, a universe in which macroscopic and microscopic do display distinct behavior must be in a very special, highly nongeneric quantum state.
The fluctuation-dissipation relation is usually formulated for a system interacting with a heat bath at finite temperature in the context of linear response theory, where only small deviations from the mean are considered. We show that for an open quantum system interacting with a non-equilibrium environment, where temperature is no longer a valid notion, a fluctuation-dissipation inequality exists. Clearly stated, quantum fluctuations are bounded below by quantum dissipation, whereas classically the fluctuations can be made to vanish. The lower bound of this inequality is exactly satisfied by…
We show the transition from a fully quantized interaction to a semiclassical one in entangled small number quantum systems using the quantum trajectories approach. In particular, we simulate the microwave Ramsey zones used in Rydberg atom interferometry, filling in the gap between the strongly entangling Jaynes Cummings evolution and the semiclassical rotation of the atomic internal states. We also correlate the information flowing with leaking photons to the entanglement generation between cavity field and flying atom and detail the roles played by the strong dissipation and the external driv…
By a generalization of the Hopfield model, we construct a microscopic Lagrangian describing a dielectric medium with dispersion and dissipation. This facilitates a well-defined and unambiguous $\textit{ab initio}$ treatment of quantum electrodynamics in such media, even in time-dependent backgrounds. As an example, we calculate the number of photons created by switching on and off dissipation in dependence on the temporal switching function. This effect may be stronger than quantum radiation produced by variations of the refractive index $Δn(t)$ since the latter are typically very small and yi…
We show that the pointer basis distinguished by collisional decoherence consists of exponentially localized, solitonic wave packets. Based on the orthogonal unraveling of the quantum master equation, we characterize their formation and dynamics, and we demonstrate that the statistical weights arising from an initial superposition state are given by the required projection. Since the spatial width of the pointer states can be obtained by accounting for the gas environment in a microscopically realistic fashion, one may thus calculate the coherence length of a strongly interacting gas.
Without access to the full quantum state, modeling dissipation in an open system requires approximations. The physical soundness of such approximations relies on using realistic microscopic models of dissipation that satisfy completely positive dynamical maps. Here we present an approach based on the use of the Bohmian conditional wave function that, by construction, ensures a completely positive dynamical map for either Markovian or non-Markovian scenarios, while allowing the implementation of realistic dissipation sources. Our approach is applied to compute the current-voltage characteristic…
With the exception of superselection rules, there are no known explicit violations of the Principle of quantum Superposition. However, quantum measurement and the emergence of classicality seem to imply that the Principle of Superposition is not universal, so perhaps new superselection rules or something similar wait to be found. This invites us to search for explicit violations of superposition, even in places where we expect it to hold. Given that many quantum measurement devices rely on atoms absorbing photons, these processes are natural places for a first search for such violations. We pr…
The dynamical status of isolated quantum systems, partly due to the linearity of the Schrodinger equation is unclear: Conventional measures fail to detect chaos in such systems. However, when quantum systems are subjected to observation -- as all experimental systems must be -- their dynamics is no longer linear and, in the appropriate limit(s), the evolution of expectation values, conditioned on the observations, closely approaches the behavior of classical trajectories. Here we show, by analyzing a specific example, that microscopic continuously observed quantum systems, even far from any cl…
Inspired by the microscopic control over dissipative processes in quantum optics and cold atoms, we develop an open-system framework to study dissipative control of transport in strongly interacting fermionic systems, relevant for both solid state and cold atom experiments. We show how subgap currents exhibiting Multiple Andreev Reflections -- the stimulated transport of electrons in the presence of Cooper-pairs -- can be controlled via engineering of superconducting leads or superfluid atomic gases. Our approach incorporates dissipation within the channel, which is naturally occurring and can…
We present a microscopic approach to quantum dissipation and sketch the derivation of the kinetic equation describing the evolution of a simple quantum system in interaction with a complex quantum system. A typical quantum complex system is modeled by means of parametric banded random matrices coupled to the subsystem of interest. We do not assume the weak coupling limit and allow for an independent dynamics of the ``reservoir''. We discuss the reasons for having a new theoretical approach and the new elements introduced by us. The present approach incorporates known limits and previous result…
Dynamic correlation and response functions of classical and quantum systems in thermal equilibrium are connected by fluctuation-dissipation theorems, which allow an alternative definition of their (unique) temperature. Motivated by this fundamental property, we revisit the issue of thermalization of closed many-body quantum systems long after a sudden quench, focussing on the non-equilibrium dynamics of the Ising chain in a critical transverse field. We show the emergence of distinct observable-dependent effective temperatures, which rule out Gibbs thermalization in a strict sense but might st…
The quantum dynamics of two weakly coupled nonlinear oscillators is analytically and numerically investigated in the context of nonlinear dissipation. The latter facilitates the creation and preservation of non-classical steady states. Starting from a microscopic description of two oscillators individually interacting with their dissipative environments, it is found that in addition to energy relaxation, dephasing arises due to the mutual coupling. Using the negativity as an entanglement measure, it is shown that the coupling entangles the oscillators in the long-time limit. For finite tempera…
The eigenstate thermalization hypothesis (ETH) offers a universal mechanism for the approach to equilibrium of closed quantum many-body systems. So far, however, experimental studies have focused on the relaxation dynamics of observables as described by the diagonal part of ETH, whose verification requires substantial numerical input. This leaves many of the general assumptions of ETH untested. Here, we propose a theory-independent route to probe the full ETH in quantum simulators by observing the emergence of fluctuation-dissipation relations, which directly probe the off-diagonal part of ETH…
We devise a microscopic model for the emergence of a collision-induced, fermionic atomic current across a tilted optical lattice. Tuning the - experimentally controllable - parameters of the microscopic dynamics allows to switch from Ohmic to negative differential conductance.
We present a novel class of nonlinear dynamical systems - a hybrid of relativistic quantum and classical systems, and demonstrate that multistability is ubiquitous. A representative setting is coupled systems of a topological insulator and an insulating ferromagnet, where the former possesses an insulating bulk with topologically protected, dissipationless, and conducting surface electronic states governed by the relativistic quantum Dirac Hamiltonian and latter is described by the nonlinear classical evolution of its magnetization vector. The interactions between the two are essentially the s…
We derive a microscopic model for dissipative dynamics in a system of mutually interacting qubits coupled to a thermal bath that generalises the dissipative model of Landau-Lifschitz-Gilbert to the case of anisotropic bath couplings. We show that the dissipation acts to bias the quantum trajectories towards a reduced phase space. This model applies to a system of superconducting flux qubits whose coupling to the environment is necessarily anisotropic. We study the model in the context of the D-Wave computing device and show that the form of environmental coupling in this case produces dynamics…
We analytically describe the decay to equilibrium of generic observables of a non-integrable system after a perturbation in the form of a random matrix. We further obtain an analytic form for the time-averaged fluctuations of an observable in terms of the rate of decay to equilibrium. Our result shows the emergence of a Fluctuation-Dissipation theorem corresponding to a classical Brownian process, specifically, the Ornstein-Uhlenbeck process. Our predictions can be tested in quantum simulation experiments, thus helping to bridge the gap between theoretical and experimental research in quantum …
We present an exact solution in arbitrary dimensions for the steady states of a class of quantum driven-dissipative bosonic models, where a set of modes is subject to arbitrary two-photon driving, single-photon loss and a global Hubbard (or Kerr)-like interaction. Our solutions reveal a wealth of striking phenomena, including the emergence of dissipative phase transitions, nontrivial mode competition physics and symmetry breaking, and the stabilization of many-body $SU(1,1)$ pair coherent states. Our exact solutions enable the description of spatial correlations, and are fully valid in regimes…
We examine the macroscopic quantum tunneling (MQT) in high-Tc superconductor Josephson junctions with a d-wave order parameter. Using microscopic Hamiltonian and the functional integral method, we analytically obtain the MQT rate (the inverse lifetime of the metastable state) for the c-axis twist Josephson junctions. In the case of the zero twist angle, the system shows the super-Ohmic dissipation due to the presence of the nodal quasiparticle tunneling. Therefore, the MQT rate is strongly suppressed in compared with the finite twist angle cases.
Caldeira and Leggett (CL) in a seminal paper derived a master equation describing Markovian Quantum Brownian motion. Such an equation suffered of not being completely positive, and many efforts have been made to solve this issue. We show that, when a careful mathematical analysis is performed, the model considered by CL leads to a non dissipative master equation. We argue that the correct way to understand the master equation derived in the CL regime is to consider it non-Markovian. Moreover, we show that if one wants to provide a microscopic description of Quantum Brownian motion with the CL …
Berry phase effect plays a central role in many mesoscale condensed matter and quantum chemical systems that are naturally under the environmental influence of dissipation. We propose and microscopically derive a prototypical quantum coherent tunneling model around a monopole or conical potential intersection in order to address the intriguing but overlooked interplay between dissipation and topologically nontrivial Berry phase effect. We adopt the instanton approach with both symmetry analysis and accurate numerical solutions that consistently incorporate nonperturbative dissipation and Berry…
We discuss recent experimental evidence of decoherence in a laboratory mesoscopic system in a cavity, from which we draw analogies with the decoherence that we argue is induced by microscopic quantum-gravity fluctuations in the space-time background. We emphasize the parallel rôles played in both cases by dissipation through non-trivial vacuum fluctuations that trigger the collapse of an initially coherent quantum state. We review a phenomenological parametrization of possible effects of this kind in the neutral kaon system, where they would induce CPT violation, and describe some epxerimental…
