We consider a system of two coupled oscillators one of which is driven parametrically and investigate both classical and quantum dynamics within Floquet description. Characteristic changes in the time evolution of the quantum fluctuations are observed for dynamically stable and unstable regions. Dynamical instability generated by the parametrically driven oscillator leads to infinite temperature thermalization of the undriven oscillator which is evident from the equi-partitioning of energy, reduced density matrix and saturation of entanglement entropy. We also confirm that the classical Lyapunov exponent is correctly captured from the growth rate of `unequal time commutator' of dynamical variables which indicates thermalization stems from the instability in quantum system.
We determine the quasistationary distribution of Floquet-state occupation probabilities for a parametrically driven harmonic oscillator coupled to a thermal bath. Since the system exhibits detailed balance, and the canonical representatives of its quasienergies are equidistant, these probabilities are given by a geometrical Boltzmann distribution, but its quasitemperature differs from the actual temperature of the bath, being affected by the functional form of the latter's spectral density. We provide two examples of quasithermal engineering, i.e., of deliberate manipulation of the quasistatio…
We show that the noise spectrum of a parametrically excited nonlinear oscillator can display a fine structure. It emerges from the interplay of the nonequidistance of the oscillator quasienergy levels and quantum heating that accompanies relaxation. The heating leads to a finite-width distribution over the quasienergy, or Floquet states even for zero temperature of the thermal reservoir coupled to the oscillator. The fine structure is due to transitions from different quasienergy levels, and thus it provides a sensitive tool for studying the distribution. For larger damping, where the fine str…
We study the dissipative dynamics of a single quantum harmonic oscillator subjected to a parametric driving with in an effective Hamiltonian approach. Using Liouville von Neumann approach, we show that the time evolution of a parametrically driven dissipative quantum oscillator has a strong connection with the classical damped Mathieu equation. Based on the numerical analysis of the Monodromy matrix, we demonstrate that the dynamical instability generated by the parametric driving are reduced by the effect of dissipation. Further, we obtain a closed relationship between the localization of the…
We study switching between period-two states of an underdamped quantum oscillator modulated at nearly twice its natural frequency. For all temperatures and parameter values switching occurs via quantum activation: it is determined by diffusion over oscillator quasienergy, provided the relaxation rate exceeds the rate of interstate tunneling. The diffusion has quantum origin and accompanies relaxation to the stable state. We find the semiclassical distribution over quasienergy. For T=0, where the system has detailed balance, this distribution differs from the distribution for $T\to 0$; the T=0 …
We study a quantum harmonic oscillator undergoing thermalization. To describe the thermalization process, we generalize the Ermakov-Lewis-Riesenfeld (ELR) invariant method for the oscillator. After imposing appropriate conditions on the thermalization process, we introduce an ansatz equation that describes the time evolution effectively. We write down the first law for thermalization in the same form as that for ordinary thermodynamics. Here, the thermalization effect appears through a change of the ELR frequency. Finally, we obtain the oscillator's energy undergoing thermalization as a functi…
Entanglement pre-thermalization (EP) is a quasi-stationary nonequilibrium state of a composite system in which each individual subsystem looks thermal but the entire system remains nonthermal due to quantum entanglement between subsystems. We theoretically study the dynamics of EP following a coherent split of a one-dimensional harmonic potential in which two interacting bosons are confined. This problem is equivalent to that of an interaction quench between two harmonic oscillators. We show that this simple model captures the bare essentials of EP; that is, each subsystem relaxes to an approx…
We propose a protocol for quantum state tomography of nonclassical states in optomechanical systems. Using a parametric drive, the procedure overcomes the challenges of weak optomechanical coupling, poor detection efficiency, and thermal noise to enable high efficiency homodyne measurement. Our analysis is based on the analytic description of the generalized measurement that is performed when optomechanical position measurement competes with thermal noise and a parametric drive. The proposed experimental procedure is numerically simulated in realistic parameter regimes, which allows us to show…
We study the dissipative quantum harmonic oscillator with general non-thermal preparations of the harmonic oscillator bath. The focus is on equilibration of the oscillator in the long-time limit and the additional requirements for thermalization. Our study is based on the exact solution of the microscopic model obtained by means of operator equations of motion, which provides us with the time evolution of the central oscillator density matrix in terms of the propagating function. We find a hierarchy of conditions for thermalization, together with the relation of the asymptotic temperature to t…
We investigate the longstanding problem of thermalization of quantum systems coupled to an environment by focusing on a bistable quartic oscillator interacting with a finite number of harmonic oscillators. In order to overcome the exponential wall that one usually encounters in grid based approaches to solve the time-dependent Schrödinger equation of the extended system, methods based on the time-dependent variational principle are best suited. Here we will apply the method of coupled coherent states [D. V. Shalashilin and M. S. Child, J. Chem. Phys. {\bf 113}, 10028 (2000)]. By investigating …
Using the parametrically driven harmonic oscillator as a working example, we study two different Markovian approaches to the quantum dynamics of a periodically driven system with dissipation. In the simpler approach, the driving enters the master equation for the reduced density operator only in the Hamiltonian term. An improved master equation is achieved by treating the entire driven system within the Floquet formalism and coupling it to the reservoir as a whole. The different ensuing evolution equations are compared in various representations, particularly as Fokker-Planck equations for the…
We show that macroscopic thermalization and transport impose constraints on matrix elements entering the Eigenstate Thermalization Hypothesis (ETH) ansatz and require them to be correlated. It is often assumed that the ETH reduces to Random Matrix Theory (RMT) below the Thouless energy scale. We show this conventional picture is not self-consistent. We prove that energy scale at which the RMT behavior emerges has to be parametrically smaller than the inverse timescale of the slowest thermalization mode coupled to the operator of interest. We argue that the timescale marking the onset of the RM…
We investigate an approach to universal quantum computation based on the modulation of longitudinal qubit-oscillator coupling. We show how to realize a controlled-phase gate by simultaneously modulating the longitudinal coupling of two qubits to a common oscillator mode. In contrast to the more familiar transversal qubit-oscillator coupling, the magnitude of the effective qubit-qubit interaction does not rely on a small perturbative parameter. As a result, this effective interaction strength can be made large, leading to short gate times and high gate fidelities. We moreover show how the gate …
We introduce the quantitative measures characterizing the rates of decoherence and thermalization of quantum systems. We study the time evolution of these measures in the case of a quantum harmonic oscillator whose relaxation is described in the framework of the standard master equation, for various initial states (coherent, `cat', squeezed and number). We establish the conditions under which the true decoherence measure can be approximated by the linear entropy $1-{Tr}\hatρ^2$. We show that at low temperatures and for highly excited initial states the decoherence process consists of three dis…
Fast nonadiabatic control protocols known as shortcuts to adiabaticity have found a plethora of applications, but their use has been severely limited to speeding up the dynamics of isolated quantum systems. We introduce shortcuts for open quantum processes that make possible the fast control of Gaussian states in non-unitary processes. Specifically, we provide the time modulation of the trap frequency and dephasing strength that allow preparing an arbitrary thermal state in a finite time. Experimental implementation can be done via stochastic parametric driving or continuous measurements, read…
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.…
We consider a particle in the approximation of a harmonic oscillator, coupled linearly to a field modeling an environment. The field is described by an infinite set of harmonic oscillators, and the system (particle--field) is considered in a cavity at thermal equilibrium. We employ the notions of bare and dressed coordinates to study the time evolution of the occupation number. With dressed coordinates no renormalization procedure is required, leading directly to a finite result. In particular, for a large time, the occupation number of the particle becomes independent of its initial value. So…
In this paper we study the nonequilibrium evolution of a quantum Brownian oscillator, modeling the internal degree of freedom of a harmonic atom or an Unruh-DeWitt detector, coupled to a nonequilibrium, nonstationary quantum field and inquire whether a fluctuation-dissipation relation can exist after/if it approaches equilibration. This is a nontrivial issue since a squeezed bath field cannot reach equilibration and yet, as this work shows, the system oscillator indeed can, which is a necessary condition for FDRs. We discuss three different settings: A) The bath field essentially remains in a …
There is much interest in how quantum systems thermalize after a sudden change, because unitary evolution should preclude thermalization. The eigenstate thermalization hypothesis resolves this because all observables for quantum states in a small energy window have essentially the same value; it is violated for integrable systems due to the infinite number of conserved quantities. Here, we show that when a system is driven by a DC electric field there are five generic behaviors: (i) monotonic or (ii) oscillatory approach to an infinite-temperature steady state; (iii) monotonic or (iv) oscillat…
We study the position estimation of a mechanical oscillator undergoing both detuned parametric amplification and continuous quantum measurement. This model, which can be utilised to produce squeezed states, is applied to a general optoelectromechanical system. Using a stochastic master equation formalism, we derive general formulae for the reduction in position uncertainty of one quadrature of motion. The filter for extracting the optimal position estimate from the measurement record is derived. We also find that since this scheme does not work far into the back-action dominated regime, implem…
We study the thermalization of a composite quantum system consisting of several subsystems, where only a small one of the subsystem contacts with a heat bath in equilibrium, while the rest of the composite system is contact free. We show that the whole composite system still can be thermalized after a relaxation time long enough, if the energy level structure of the composite system is connected, which means any two energy levels of the composite system can be connected by direct or indirect quantum transitions. With an example where an multi-level system interacts with a set of harmonic oscil…
We analyze in full detail the time evolution of an open Gaussian quantum system rapidly bombarded by Gaussian ancillae. As a particular case this analysis covers the thermalization (or not) of a harmonic oscillator coupled to a thermal reservoir made of harmonic oscillators. We derive general results for this scenario and apply them to the problem of thermalization. We show that only a particular family of system-environment couplings will cause the system to thermalize to the temperature of its environment. We discuss that if we want to understand thermalization as ensuing from the Markovian …
Using the Wigner-Weyl mapping of quantum mechanics to phase space we consider exactly the quantum mechanics of an harmonic oscillator driven by an external white noise force or whose frequency is time dependent, either adiabatically or parametrically. We find several transition probabilities exactly. We also consider the (quantum mechanical) randomizing effects of the external white noise force on the Weyl quantized phase angle and upon other Weyl quantized quantities.
We consider a thermal quantum harmonic oscillator weakly coupled to a heat bath at a different temperature. We analytically study the quantum heat exchange statistics between the two systems using the quantum-optical master equation. We exactly compute the characteristic function of the heat distribution and show that it verifies the Jarzynski-Wójcik fluctuation theorem. We further evaluate the heat probability density in the limit of long thermalization times, both in the low and high temperature regimes, and investigate its time evolution by calculating its first two cumulants.
We obtain a master equation for a parametrically driven optomechanical cavity. We use a more correct dissipation model that accounts for the modification of the quasienergy spectrum caused by the driving. When the natural frequency of the mechanical object oscillates periodically around its mean value, the master equation with the improved dissipation model is expressed using Floquet operators. We apply the corresponding master equation to model the laser cooling of the mechanical object. Using an adiabatic approximation, an analytical expression for the number of excitations of the mechanical…
We analyze the symmetries in an open quantum system composed by three coupled and detuned harmonic oscillators in the presence of a common heat bath. It is shown analytically how to engineer the couplings and frequencies of the system so as to have several degrees of freedom unaffected by decoherence, irrespective of the specific spectral density or initial state of the bath. This partial thermalization allows observing asymptotic entanglement at moderate temperatures, even in the nonresonant case. This latter feature cannot be seen in the simpler situation of only two oscillators, highlightin…
We consider a discrete quantum system coupled to a finite bath, which may consist of only one particle, in contrast to the standard baths which usually consist of continua of oscillators, spins, etc. We find that such finite baths may nevertheless equilibrate the system though not necessarily in the way predicted by standard open system techniques. This behavior results regardless of the initial state being correlated or not.
The generation of entanglement between two oscillators that interact via a common reservoir is theoretically studied. The reservoir is modeled by a one-dimensional harmonic crystal initially in thermal equilibrium. Starting from a separable state, the oscillators can become entangled after a transient time, that is of the order of the thermalization time scale. This behavior is observed at finite temperature even when the oscillators are at a distance significantly larger than the crystal's interparticle spacing. The underlying physical mechanisms can be explained by the dynamical properties o…
Optomechanical couplings involve both beam-splitter and two-mode-squeezing types of interactions. While the former underlies the utility of many applications, the latter creates unwanted excitations and is usually detrimental. In this work, we propose a simple but powerful method based on cavity parametric driving to suppress the unwanted excitation that does not require working with a deeply sideband-resolved cavity. Our approach is based on a simple observation: as both the optomechanical two-mode-squeezing interaction and the cavity parametric drive induce squeezing transformations of the r…
A hybrid spin-oscillator system in parametric interaction is experimentally emulated using a single NV spin qubit immersed in a radio frequency (RF) field and probed with a quasi resonant microwave (MW) field. We report on the MW mediated locking of the NV spin dynamics onto the RF field, appearing when the MW driven Rabi precession frequency approaches the RF frequency and for sufficiently large RF amplitudes. These signatures are analog to a phononic Mollow triplet in the MW rotating frame for the parametric interaction and promise to have impact in spin-dependent force detection strategies.
We describe a new mechanism of tunneling between period-two vibrational states of a weakly nonlinear parametrically modulated oscillator. The tunneling results from resonant transitions induced by the fast oscillating terms conventionally disregarded in the rotating wave approximation (RWA). The tunneling amplitude displays resonant peaks as a function of the modulation frequency; near the maxima it is exponentially larger than the RWA tunneling amplitude.
We study tunneling between period two states of a parametrically modulated oscillator. The tunneling matrix element is shown to oscillate with the varying frequency of the modulating field. The effect is due to spatial oscillations of the wave function and the related interference in the classically forbidden region. The oscillations emerge already in the ground state of the oscillator Hamiltonian in the rotating frame, which is quartic in the momentum.
Recent realization of a kinetically-constrained chain of Rydberg atoms by Bernien et al. [Nature 551, 579 (2017)] resulted in the observation of unusual revivals in the many-body quantum dynamics. In our previous work [arXiv:1711.03528] such dynamics was attributed to the existence of "quantum scarred" eigenstates in the many-body spectrum of the experimentally realized model. Here we present a detailed study of the eigenstate properties of the same model. We find that the majority of the eigenstates exhibit anomalous thermalization: the observable expectation values converge to their Gibbs en…
The study of quantum thermodynamics is key to the development of quantum thermal machines. In contrast to most of the previous proposals based on discrete strokes, here we consider a working substance that is permanently coupled to two or more baths at different temperatures and continuously driven. To this end, we investigate parametrically driven quantum harmonic oscillators coupled to heat baths via a collision model. Using a thermodynamically consistent local master equation, we derive the heat flows and power of the working device which can operate as an engine, refrigerator or accelerato…
We study parametrically driven quantum oscillators and show that, even for weak coupling between the oscillators, they can exhibit various many-body states with broken time-translation symmetry. In the quantum-coherent regime, the symmetry breaking occurs via a nonequilibrium quantum phase transition. For dissipative oscillators, the main effect of the weak coupling is to make the switching rate of an oscillator between its period-2 states dependent on the states of other oscillators. This allows mapping the oscillators onto a system of coupled spins. Away from the bifurcation parameter values…
We study a nonlinear oscillator, which is parametrically driven at a frequency close to twice its eigenfrequency. By judiciously choosing the frequency detuning and linearly increasing the driving amplitude, one can prepare any even quasienergy state starting from the oscillator ground state. Such state preparation is effectively adiabatic. We find the Wigner distribution of the prepared states. For a different choice of the frequency detuning, the adiabaticity breaks down, which allows one to prepare on demand a superposition of quasienergy states using Landau-Zener-type transitions. We find …
Using Maxwell-Bloch equations it has been shown how the superradiance can lead to amplification and gain at a frequency much larger than the pumping frequency. This remarkable effect has been examined in terms of a simpler model involving two coupled oscillators with one of them paramet- rically driven. We show that this coupled oscillator model has a hidden parity-time (PT) symmetry for QASER, we thus bring PT symmetry to the realm of parametrically coupled resonators. More- over, we find that the QASER gain arises from the broken PT symmetry phase. We then quantize the simplified version of …
We study numerically the wavefunction evolution of a Bose-Einstein condensate in a Bunimovich stadium billiard being governed by the Gross-Pitaevskii equation. We show that for a moderate nonlinearity, above a certain threshold, there is emergence of dynamical thermalization which leads to the Bose-Einstein probability distribution over the linear eigenmodes of the stadium. This distribution is drastically different from the energy equipartition over oscillator degrees of freedom which would lead to the ultra-violet catastrophe. We argue that this interesting phenomenon can be studied in cold …
It has recently been shown that a parametrically driven oscillator with Kerr nonlinearity yields a Schrödinger cat state via quantum adiabatic evolution through its bifurcation point and a network of such nonlinear oscillators can be used for solving combinatorial optimization problems by bifurcation-based adiabatic quantum computation [H. Goto, Sci. Rep. \textbf{6}, 21686 (2016)]. Here we theoretically show that such a nonlinear oscillator network with controllable parameters can also be used for universal quantum computation. The initialization is achieved by a quantum-mechanical bifurcation…
Recent advances in AdS/CFT holography have suggested that the near-horizon dynamics of black holes can be described by random matrix systems. We study how the energy spectrum of a system with a generic random Hamiltonian matrix affects its early and late time thermalization behaviour using the spectral form factor (which captures the time-dependence of two-point correlation functions). We introduce a simple statistical framework for generating random spectra in terms of the nearest neighbor spacing statistics of energy eigenvalues, enabling us to compute the averaged spectral form factor in a …
We study the dynamics of a mechanical resonator parametrically coupled to a driven dissipative quantum emitter in the ultra-strong coupling regime. We show that this regime is fully compatible with a semi-classical treatment, and we derive master equations for the emitter and the resonator. We show that the fluctuations of the driven emitter's population induce the non-symmetrical scattering of the mechanical quadratures. At long timescales, such scattering back-acts on the emitter, which eventually decouples from the driving light. This optical noise at the quantum limit is observable with st…
We consider a particle in the harmonic approximation coupled linearly to an environment. modeled by an infinite set of harmonic oscillators. The system (particle--environment) is considered in a cavity at thermal equilibrium. We employ the recently introduced notion of renormalized coordinates to investigate the time evolution of the particle occupation number. For comparison we first present this study in bare coordinates. For a long ellapsed time, in both approaches, the occupation number of the particle becomes independent of its initial value. The value of ocupation number of the particle …
We show that a parametrically coupled qubit can be used to fully reconstruct the quantum state of a harmonic oscillator, even when both systems are subject to decoherence. By controlling the coupling strength of the qubit over time, the characteristic function of the oscillator at any phase space point can be directly measured by combining the expectation values of two Pauli operators. The effect of decoherence can be filtered out from the measured data, provided a sufficient number of experimental runs is performed. In situations where full state reconstruction is not practical or not necessa…
We experimentally investigate a mechanical squeezed state realized in a parametrically-modulated membrane resonator embedded in an optical cavity. We demonstrate that a quantum characteristic of the squeezed dynamics can be revealed and quantified even in a moderately warm oscillator, through the analysis of motional sidebands. We provide a theoretical framework for quantitatively interpreting the observations and present an extended comparison with the experiment. A notable result is that the spectral shape of each motional sideband provides a clear signature of a quantum mechanical squeezed …
