We derive a Born-Markov master equation describing the dissipation induced by a bath of lossy but coherently driven two-level systems (TLS) coupled to a bosonic system via Jaynes-Cummings interaction. We analytically derive all the master equation rates. We characterize these rates for the particular case of a single-mode system coupled to identical TLS. We study the steady state of the system and its exotic properties stemming from the non-thermal stationary state of the driven TLS bath. These properties include dissipative amplification, bath-induced linear instability, and both coherent and dissipative squeezing. The master equation is valid for arbitrarily strong TLS driving, and it can be generalized to include multi-level systems or other system-bath interaction terms, among others. Our work provides a tool to study and characterize TLS-induced decoherence, a key limiting factor in quantum technological devices based on, for instance, superconducting circuits, magnonic systems, or quantum acoustics.
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 consider a system of two strongly coupled electron spins in zero magnetic field, each of which is interacting with an individual bath of nuclear spins via the hyperfine interaction. Applying the long spin approximation (LSA) introduced in Europhys. Lett. 95, 47009 (here each bath is replaced by a single long spin), we numerically study the electron spin and entanglement dynamics. We demonstrate that the decoherence time is scaling with the bath size according to a power law. As expected, the decaying part of the dynamics decreases with increasing bath polarization. However, surprisingly it …
Finding efficient descriptions of how an environment affects a collection of discrete quantum systems would lead to new insights into many areas of modern physics. Markovian, or time-local, methods work well for individual systems, but for groups a question arises: does system-bath or inter-system coupling dominate the dissipative dynamics? The answer has profound consequences for the long-time quantum correlations within the system. We consider two bosonic modes coupled to a bath. By comparing an exact solution to different Markovian master equations, we find that a smooth crossover of the eq…
Although the main loss channel of planar microwave superconducting resonators has been identified to be related to an external coupling to a two-level system (TLS) bath, the behavior of such a cavity in the presence of an off-resonant pump has yet to be fully understood. Here a semi-classical model that predicts a power-dependent frequency shift besides the well-known TLS-induced damping is derived. The model is validated experimentally by performing a two-tone spectroscopy of several resonators fabricated on various substrates. Together with the provided analytic formulas, the technique propo…
The decoherence of mixed electron-nuclear spin qubits is a topic of great current importance, but understanding is still lacking: while important decoherence mechanisms for spin qubits arise from quantum spin bath environments with slow decay of correlations, the only analytical framework for explaining observed sharp variations of decoherence times with magnetic field is based on the suppression of classical noise. Here we obtain a general expression for decoherence times of the central spin system which exposes significant differences between quantum-bath decoherence and decoherence by class…
The unavoidable interaction of a quantum system with its surrounding (bath) is not always detrimental for quantum properties. For instance, under some specific conditions (that we identify as indistinguishability), a many-body system can gain internal coherences thanks to the interaction with its bath. The most famous consequence of this phenomenon is superradiance. Beyond that, the thermodynamic effects on the system of these bath-induced coherences have been mostly unexplored. We show here, for a simple and common system (a pair of two-level systems), that the energetic and entropic impacts …
When an open quantum system is driven by an external time-dependent force, the coupling of the driving to the central system is usually included whereas the impact of the driving field on the bath is neglected. We investigate the effect of a quantum bath of linearly driven harmonic oscillators on the relaxation dynamics of a quantum two-level system which itself is not directly driven. In particular, we calculate the frequency-dependent response of the system when the bath is subject to a Dirac and a Gaussian driving-pulse. We show that a time-retarded effective force on the system is induced …
We analyze the strong-coupling dynamics of a driven harmonic oscillator whose energy is modulated by a continuum of other bosonic modes. This type of system-bath interaction appears, for example, in optomechanical or equivalent circuit QED setups, where the frequency of a confined photonic mode depends linearly on a fluctuating boundary. Compared to the canonical spin-boson model, where coupling to bath modes only leads to decoherence, the role of the environment in such systems is more complex, since it also provides the only source of nonlinearity. We show that even for an unstructured bath,…
The longitudinal coupling of a system to the bath usually induces the pure dephasing of the system. In this paper, we study the collective dephasing induced dissipation and decoherence in a coupled-qubit system with a common bath. It is shown that, compared with the case of the same system with independent baths, the interference between the dephasing processes of different qubits induced by the common bath significantly changes the dissipation of the system. For the system of two coupled qubits, the interference leads to a faster decoherence in the non-single-excitation subspaces and a slower…
Quantum correlations between two free spinless dissipative distinguishable particles (interacting with a thermal bath) are studied analytically using the quantum master equation and tools of quantum information. Bath-induced coherence and correlations in an infinite-dimensional Hilbert space are shown. We show that for temperature T > 0 the time-evolution of the reduced density matrix cannot be written as the direct product of two independent particles. We have found a time-scale that characterizes the time when the bath-induced coherence is maximum before being wiped out by dissipation (purit…
We analyze the topological deformations of a spin-1/2 in an effective magnetic field induced by an ohmic quantum dissipative environment at zero temperature. From Bethe Ansatz results and a variational approach, we confirm that the Chern number is preserved in the delocalized phase for $α<1$. We report a divergence of the Berry curvature at the equator when $α_c=1$ that appears at the localization Kosterlitz-Thouless quantum phase transition in this model. Recent experiments in quantum circuits have engineered non-equilibrium protocols in time to access topological properties at equilibrium fr…
Engineering a driven-dissipative bath of altermagnetic quantum magnons for controlling classical dynamics of spins hosting spin waves, domain walls, or skyrmions
The solution of the quantum Zermelo navigation problem is applied to the non-Markovian open system dynamics of a set of quantum systems interacting with a common environment. We consider a case allowing an exact time-optimal realization of environment-mediated non-local system unitaries. For a linear coupling to a harmonic bosonic bath, we derive a speed limit for the implementation time in terms of the fundamental frequency of the bath modes. As a product of two exponentials of the local free wind and the pairwise system-coupling, the Zermelo unitary forms a natural building block for reachin…
We explore the dynamics and the steady state of a driven quantum spin coupled to a bath of fermions, which can be realized with a strongly imbalanced mixture of ultracold atoms using currently available experimental tools. Radio-frequency driving can be used to induce tunneling between the spin states. The Rabi oscillations are modified due to the coupling of the quantum spin to the environment, which causes frequency renormalization and damping. The spin-bath coupling can be widely tuned by adjusting the scattering length through a Feshbach resonance. When the scattering potential creates a b…
Self-assembled quantum dots are ideal structures in which to test theories of open quantum systems: Confined exciton states can be coherently manipulated and their decoherence properties are dominated by interactions with acoustic phonons. We here describe the interaction of a pair of un-coupled, driven, quantum dot excitons with a common phonon environment, and find that this coupling effectively generates two kinds of interaction between the two quantum dots: An elastic coupling mediated by virtual phonons and an inelastic coupling mediated by real phonons. We show that both of these interac…
The reduced dynamics of a single or two qubits coupled to an interacting quantum spin bath modeled by a XXZ spin chain is investigated. By using the method of time-dependent density matrix renormalization group (t-DMRG), we go beyond the uniform coupling central spin model and evaluate nonperturbatively the induced decoherence and entanglement. It is shown that both decoherence and entanglement strongly depend on the phase of the underlying spin bath. We show that in general, spin baths can induce entanglement for an initially disentangled pair of qubits. Furthermore, when the spin bath is in …
Spin bath polarization is the key to enhancing the sensitivity of quantum sensing and information processing. Significant effort has been invested in identifying the consequences of quantumness and its control for spin-bath polarization. Here, by contrast, we focus on the adverse role of quantum correlations (entanglement) in a spin bath that can impede its cooling in many realistic scenarios. We propose to remove this impediment by modified cooling schemes, incorporating probe-induced disentanglement via alternating, non-commuting probe-bath interactions, so as to suppress the buildup of quan…
In this paper we study the decoherence and purity of a driven solid-state qubit in the Ohmic bath by using the method based on the master equation. At first, instead of solving the master equation we investigate the coefficients of the equation which describe the shift in frequency, diffusive, decoherence, and so on. It is shown that one of the coefficients (we called it decoherence coefficient) is crucial to the decoherence of the qubit in the model. Then we investigate the evolution of the purity of the state in the model. From the analysis of the purity we see that the decoherence time of t…
We analyze an open many-body system that is strongly coupled at its boundaries to interacting quantum baths. We show that the two-body interactions inside the baths induce emergent phenomena in the spin transport. The system and baths are modeled as independent spin chains resulting in a global non-homogeneous XXZ model. The evolution of the system-bath state is simulated using matrix-product-states methods. We present two phase transitions induced by bath interactions. For weak bath interactions we observe ballistic and insulating phases. However, for strong bath interactions a diffusive phas…
We study decoherence induced on a two-level system coupled to a one-dimensional quantum spin chain. We consider the cases where the dynamics of the chain is determined by the Ising, XY, or Heisenberg exchange Hamiltonian. This model of quantum baths can be of fundamental importance for the understanding of decoherence in open quantum systems, since it can be experimentally engineered by using atoms in optical lattices. As an example, here we show how to implement a pure dephasing model for a qubit system coupled to an interacting spin bath. We provide results that go beyond the case of a centr…
We explore the nonunital non-Markovian dynamics of a qubit immersed in a spin bath. The nonunital environmental effects on the precisions of quantum parameter estimation are investigated. The time-dependent transfer matrix and inhomogeneity vector are obtained for the description of the open dynamical process. The evolution of the coherent vectors for a qubit is studied so as to geometrically demonstrate the nonunital non-Markovian effects. The revivals of angles for the fidelity between a maximal mixed state and an arbitrary trajectory state are presented in the nonunital non-Markovian dynami…
The paper deals with the problem of dynamics of externally driven open quantum systems. Using the path integral methods we found an analytical expression for time-dependent density matrix of two externally driven coupled quantum oscillators interacting with different baths of oscillators. It is shown that at the zeroing of external forces the density matrix becomes identical to the previously obtained one for freely developing coupled oscillators. Mean values of observables are computed by using the Hermitian part of the matrix. All elements of the covariance matrix composed by coordinates and…
This Letter deals with the time evolution of a qubit weakly coupled to a reservoir which has a symmetry broken state with long range order at finite temperatures. In particular, we model the ordered reservoir by a standard BCS superconductor with s-wave pairing. We study the reduced density matrix of a qubit using both the time-convolutionless and Nakajima-Zwanzig approximations. We study different kinds of couplings between the qubit and the superconducting bath. We find that ordering in the superconducting bath generically leads to an unfavorable non- Markovian faster-than-exponential decay …
We study a quantum harmonic oscillator linearly coupled through the position operator $\hat{q}$ to a first bath and through the momentum operator $\hat{p}$ to a second bath yielding an Ohmic-Drude dissipation. We analyse the oscillator's fluctuations as a function of the ratio between the strength of the two couplings, focusing in particular on the situation in which the two dissipative interactions are comparable. Analytic formulas are derived in the relevant regimes corresponding to the low temperature limit and when the Drude high frequency cutoff is much larger than all other frequencies. …
In this work we propose a way to unveil the type of environmental noise in strongly driven superconducting flux qubits through the analysis of the Landau-Zener-Stückelberg (LZS) interferometry. We study both the two-level and the multilevel dynamics of the flux qubit driven by a dc+ac magnetic field. We found that the LZS interference patterns exhibit well defined multiphoton resonances whose shape strongly depend on the time scale and the type of coupling to a quantum bath. For the case of transverse system-bath coupling, the n-photon resonances are narrow and nearly symmetric with respect to…
A common environment acting on a pair of qubits gives rise to a plethora of different phenomena, such as the generation of qubit-qubit entanglement, quantum synchronization and subradiance. Here we define time-independent figures of merit for entanglement generation, quantum synchronization and subradiance, and perform an extensive analytical and numerical study of their dependence on model parameters. We also address a recently proposed measure of the collectiveness of the dynamics driven by the bath, and find that it almost perfectly witnesses the behavior of entanglement generation. Our res…
A general theory is presented for the treatment of decoherence of a multilevel quantum system (with many degrees of freedom) interacting with multi-bath reservoir and driven by ac fields. In this approach, the system is described by a reduced density operator and the multi-bath reservoir is characterized by a number of spectral densities. The reduced density operator is governed by the master equation in which the effect of ac driving fields and the leakage to non-computational states are included. The theory is applied to the study of decoherence of a two-dimensional (2D) SQUID flux qubit cou…
We discuss how standard $T_2$-based quantum sensing and noise spectroscopy protocols often give rise to an inadvertent quench of the system or environment being probed: there is an effective sudden change in the environmental Hamiltonian at the start of the sensing protocol. These quenches are extremely sensitive to the initial environmental state, and lead to observable changes in the sensor qubit evolution. We show how these new features can be used to directly access environmental response properties. This enables methods for direct measurement of bath temperature, and methods to diagnose n…
We study the entanglement dynamics for a two-spin system coupled to a spin environment of different configurations by z-x type interaction. The models considered in this paper are solved both analytically and numerically giving rise to some concise analytical expressions when certain approximations are properly made. Our purpose is to find how the initial states of the environment with different numbers of spins affect the decay or revival of the entanglement between central qubits. In Particular, it is found that the block-entangled environment could speed up the decay and revival of the qubi…
In quantum state tomography, one potential source of error is uncontrolled contact of the system with a heat bath whose detailed properties are not known, and whose impact on the system moreover varies between different runs of the experiment. Precisely these variations provide a handle for reconstructing the system's effective relaxation dynamics. I propose a pertinent estimation scheme which is based on a steepest-descent ansatz and maximum likelihood. After reconstructing the relaxation dynamics, the original quantum state of the system can be constrained to a curve in state space.
We investigate how two spatially separated qubits coupled to a common heat bath can be entangled by purely dissipative dynamics. We identify a dynamical time scale associated with the lifetime of the dissipatively generated entanglement and show that it can be much longer than either the typical single-qubit decoherence time or the time scale on which a direct exchange interaction can entangle the qubits. We give an approximate analytical expression for the long-time evolution of the qubit concurrence and propose an ion trap scheme in which such dynamics should be observable.
The nuclear spin bath (NSB) dynamics and its quantum control are of importance for the storage and processing of quantum information within a semiconductor environment. In the presence of a carrier spin, primarily it is the hyperfine interaction that rules the high frequency NSB characteristics. Here, we first study the overall coherence decay and rephasings in a hyperfine-driven NSB through the temporal and spectral behaviors of the so-called Loschmidt echo (LE). Its dependence on the NSB size, initial polarization, and coupling inhomogeneity are separately investigated, which leads to a simp…
We consider an $S=1/2$ antiferromagnetic quantum Heisenberg chain where each site is coupled to an independent bosonic bath with ohmic dissipation. The coupling to the bath preserves the global SO(3) spin symmetry. Using large-scale, approximation-free quantum Monte Carlo simulations, we show that any finite coupling to the bath suffices to stabilize long-range antiferromagnetic order. This is in stark contrast to the isolated Heisenberg chain where spontaneous breaking of the SO(3) symmetry is forbidden by the Mermin-Wagner theorem. A linear spin-wave theory analysis confirms that the memory …
The "self-induced decoherence" (SID) approach suggests that (1) the expectation value of any observable becomes diagonal in the eigenstates of the total Hamiltonian for systems endowed with a continuous energy spectrum, and (2), that this process can be interpreted as decoherence. We evaluate the first claim in the context of a simple spin bath model. We find that even for large environments, corresponding to an approximately continuous energy spectrum, diagonalization of the expectation value of random observables does in general not occur. We explain this result and conjecture that SID is li…
We study theoretically the phonon-induced relaxation and decoherence processes in the hybrid qubit in silicon. Hybrid qubit behaves as a charge qubit when the detuning is close to zero and as spin qubit for large detuning values. It is realized starting from an electrostatically defined double quantum dot where three electrons are confined and manipulated through only electrical tuning. By employing a three-level effective model for the qubit and describing the environment bath as a series of harmonic oscillators in the thermal equilibrium states, we extract the relaxation and decoherence time…
We study the role of bath-induced correlations in temperature estimation of cold bosonic baths. Our protocol includes multiple probes, that are not interacting, nor are they initially correlated to each other. They interact with a bosonic sample and reach a nonthermal steady state, which is measured to estimate the temperature of the sample. It is well known that in the steady state such noninteracting probes may get correlated to each other and even entangled. Nonetheless, the impact of these correlations in metrology has not been deeply investigated yet. Here, we examine their role for therm…
Induced interactions and bound states of charge carriers immersed in a quantum medium are crucial for the investigation of quantum transport. Ultracold atom-ion systems can provide a convenient platform for studying this problem. Here, we investigate the static properties of one and two ionic impurities in a bosonic bath using quantum Monte Carlo methods. We identify three bipolaronic regimes depending on the strength of the atom-ion potential and the number of its two-body bound states: a perturbative regime resembling the situation of a pair of neutral impurities, a non-perturbative regime t…
Heat and noise control is essential for the continued development of quantum technologies. For this purpose, a particularly powerful tool is the heat rectifier, which allows for heat transport in one configuration of two baths but not the reverse. Here we propose a class of rectifiers that exploits the unidirectionality of a low temperature bath to force the system into a dark state thus blocking heat transport in one configuration of the two baths. However, if the two baths are switched around, a heat current is observed. An implementation using a qutrit coupled to two harmonic oscillators is…
We establish for the first time an exact stochastic dynamical equation for an open quantum systems coupled to correlated noises. We rigorously investigate the nonequilibrium dynamics of a qubit system under the influence of two strongly correlated non-Markovian baths by exactly solving the stochastic Schrödinger equation of an open quantum system. We show that the quantum dynamics of the qubit system is profoundly modulated by the mutual correlation between baths and the bath memory times through dissipation and fluctuation. We report a new physical effect on generating large values of the inn…
We summarize our recent results for the induced exchange interaction due to thermal bosonic environment (bath) which also generates quantum noise. Our focus here is on the onset of the interaction. We demonstrate that the induced interaction can be used to manipulate and create entanglement over time scales sufficiently large for controlling the two-qubit system for quantum computing applications, though ultimately the noise effects will dominate.
We study the behavior of the Rabi oscillations of a driven central spin (qubit) coupled to an antiferromagnetic spin bath (environment). It is found that the decoherence behavior of the central spin depends on the detuning, driving strength, the qubit-bath coupling and an important factor, associated with the number of the coupled atoms, the detailed lattice structure, and the temperature of the environment. If the detuning exists, the Rabi oscillations may show the behavior of collapses and revivals; however, if the detuning is zero, such a behavior will not appear. We investigate the weighte…
I present the exact solution of a toy model for gravitationally induced decoherence. The toy model has Hamiltonian resembling optomechanical systems. It is an oscillator system coupled through its energy to an oscillator heat bath. I find the decoherence effect of vacuum fluctuations at zero temperature. Also for a finite bath I show that the decoherence is in general present and the system does not return to its initial coherence unless the fundamental frequencies of the bath have rational ratios.
We investigate the decoherence properties of a central system composed of two spins 1/2 in contact with a spin bath. The dynamical regime of the bath ranges from a fully integrable integrable limit to complete chaoticity. We show that the dynamical regime of the bath determines the efficiency of the decoherence process. For perturbative regimes, the integrable limit provides stronger decoherence, while in the strong coupling regime the chaotic limit becomes more efficient. We also show that the decoherence time behaves in a similar way. On the contrary, the rate of decay of magnitudes like lin…
We provide an analytic solution to the problem of system-bath dynamics under the effect of high-frequency driving that has applications in a large class of settings, such as driven-dissipative many-body systems. Our method relies on discrete symmetries of the system-bath Hamiltonian and provides the time evolution operator of the full system, including bath degrees of freedom, without weak-coupling or Markovian assumptions. An interpretation of the solution in terms of the strobo- scopic evolution of a family of observables under the influence of an effective static Hamiltonian is proposed, wh…
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.
We show that two, non interacting, infinitely long spin chains can become globally entangled at the mesoscopic level of their fluctuation operators through a purely noisy microscopic mechanism induced by the presence of a common heat bath. By focusing on a suitable class of mesoscopic observables, the behaviour of the dissipatively generated quantum correlations between the two chains is studied as a function of the dissipation strength and bath temperature.
The change of the von Neumann entropy of a set of harmonic oscillators initially in thermal equilibrium and interacting linearly with an externally driven quantum system is computed by adapting the Feynman-Vernon influence functional formalism. This quantum entropy production has the form of the expectation value of three functionals of the forward and backward paths describing the system history in the Feynman-Vernon theory. In the classical limit of Kramers-Langevin dynamics (Caldeira-Leggett model) these functionals combine to three terms, where the first is the entropy production functiona…
Quantum correlations and coherence generated between two free spinless particles in the lattice, interacting with a common quantum phonon bath, are studied. The reduced density matrix is solved using the Markov approach. We show that the bath induces correlations between the particles. The coherence induced by the bath is studied, calculating off-diagonal elements of the density matrix, spatiotemporal dispersion, purity and quantum mutual information. We find a characteristic time-scale pointing out when this coherence is maximum. In addition, a Wigner-like distribution in the phase-space (lat…
