We consider the simple hypothesis of letting quantum systems have an inherent random nature. Using well-known stochastic methods we thus derive a stochastic evolution operator which let us define a stochastic density operator whose expectation value under certain conditions satisfies a Lindblad equation. As natural consequences of the former assumption decoherence and spontaneous emission processes are obtained under the same conceptual scheme. A temptative solution for the preferred basis problem is suggested. All this is illustrated with a comprehensive study of a two-level quantum system evolution.
It is shown how any Lindbladian evolution with selfadjoint Lindblad operators, either Markovian or nonMarkovian, can be understood as an averaged random unitary evolution. Both mathematical and physical consequences are analyzed. First a simple and fast method to solve this kind of master equations is suggested and particularly illustrated with the phase-damped master equation for the multiphoton resonant Jaynes-Cummings model in the rotating-wave approximation. A generalization to some intrinsic decoherence models present in the literature is included. Under the same philosophy a proposal to …
The phenomenon of entanglement sudden death (ESD) in finite dimensional composite open systems is described here for both bi-partite as well as multipartite cases, where individual subsystems undergo Lindblad type heat bath evolution. ESD is found to be generic for non-zero temperature of the bath. At T=0, one-sided action of the heat bath on pure entangled states of two qubits does not show ESD.
We consider the natural generalization of the Schrödinger equation to Markovian open system dynamics: the so-called the Lindblad equation. We give a quantum algorithm for simulating the evolution of an $n$-qubit system for time $t$ within precision $ε$. If the Lindbladian consists of $\mathrm{poly}(n)$ operators that can each be expressed as a linear combination of $\mathrm{poly}(n)$ tensor products of Pauli operators then the gate cost of our algorithm is $O(t\, \mathrm{polylog}(t/ε)\mathrm{poly}(n))$. We also obtain similar bounds for the cases where the Lindbladian consists of local operato…
We use the Itô stochastic calculus to give a simple derivation of the Lindblad form for the generator of a completely positive density matrix evolution, by specialization from the corresponding global form for a completely positive map. As a by-product, we obtain a generalized generator for a completely positive stochastic density matrix evolution.
Semigroups describing the time evolution of open quantum systems in finite-dimensional spaces have generators of a special form, known as Lindblad generators. These generators and the corresponding processes of time evolution are analyzed, characterized as Decay, Dissipation and Dephasing. In relation to these processes the Hilbert space of the system is equipped with a special structure, a decomposition into a sum of mutually orthogonal subspaces. The complete set of all the stationary states and the asymptotic behavior of the evolutions are presented in detail. Some unusual special facts abo…
Using the Bloch representation of an N-dimensional quantum system and immediate results from quantum stochastic calculus, we establish a closed formula for the Bloch vector, hence also for the density operator, of a quantum system following a Lindblad evolution with selfadjoint Lindblad operators.
The Lindblad equation describes the dissipative time evolution of a density matrix that characterizes an open quantum system in contact with its environment. The widespread ensemble interpretation of a density matrix requires its time evolution to be linear. However, when the density matrix is obtained from a mean field theory of interacting quantum systems or from a top-down control by a changing classical environment, the ensemble interpretation is inappropriate and nonlinear dynamics arise naturally. We therefore study the dynamical behavior of nonlinear Lindblad equations using the example…
In recent years, the Renyi entropy has repeatedly been discussed for characterization of quantum critical states and entanglement. Here, time evolution of the Renyi entropy is studied. A compact general formula is presented for the lower bound on the entropy rate.
We derive the explicit commutation relations for the generators of quantum dynamical semigroup - Markovian superoperator evolution, allowing the extension of Baker-Campbell-Hausdorff-type relations to general Lindblad-type evolutions. This provides a novel tool for exploring the interaction of time-dependent coherent and Markovian evolutions - a surprisingly rich set of behaviors which include deformation by coherent driving of Markovian terms, generation of new Lindblad terms from time-dependent noise and even a coherent driving term generated by the interaction of time-separated Markovian no…
We discuss an apparent difficulty in computing the radiation emitted by a system undergoing Lindblad evolution. The difficulty is resolved by viewing the problem as Born rule for conserved currents defined by the appropriate terms in the adjoint Lindbladian. In Heralding Alice prepares Bob's system in a state that mirrors her test. We show that heralding is consistent with no-cloning. This follows from the observation that heralding is not a completely positive map.
The dynamics of a typical open quantum system, namely a quantum Brownian particle in a harmonic potential, is studied focussing on its non-Markovian regime. Both an analytic approach and a stochastic wave function approach are used to describe the exact time evolution of the system. The border between two very different dynamical regimes, the Lindblad and non-Lindblad regimes, is identified and the relevant physical variables governing the passage from one regime to the other are singled out. The non-Markovian short time dynamics is studied in detail by looking at the mean energy, the squeezin…
The quantum dynamics of a damped and forced harmonic oscillator is investigated in terms of a Lindblad master equation. Elementary algebraic techniques are employed allowing for example to analyze the long time behavior, i.e. the quantum limit cycle. The time evolution of various expectation values is obtained in closed form as well as the entropy and the Husimi phase space distribution. We also discuss the related description in terms of a non-Hermitian Hamiltonian.
It is shown that in order for the solutions of the Lindblad equation never to give a decreasing von Neumann entropy, it is necessary and sufficient that the operators appearing in this equation should be unitary linear combinations of their adjoints. In this case, these operators may be replaced with Hermitian operators, without changing the evolution of density matrices.
The characterization of open quantum systems is a central and recurring problem for the development of quantum technologies. For time-independent systems, an (often unique) steady state describes the average physics once all the transient processes have faded out, but interesting quantum properties can emerge at intermediate timescales. Given a Lindblad master equation, these properties are encoded in the spectrum of the Liouvillian whose diagonalization, however, is a challenge even for small-size quantum systems. Here, we propose a new method to efficiently provide the Liouvillian spectral d…
We derive an analog of the Landau-Zener adiabatic tunneling formula for an open, two-level system coupled to a memoryless, dephasing bath. The derivation rests on a geometric view of the spectral subspaces as adiabatic invariants.
We investigate how to model Markovian evolution of coupled harmonic oscillators, each of them interacting with a local environment. When the coupling between the oscillators is weak, dissipation may be modeled using local Lindblad terms for each of the oscillators in the master equation, as is commonly done. When the coupling between oscillators is strong, this model may become invalid. We derive a master equation for two coupled harmonic oscillators which are subject to individual heat baths modeled by a collection of harmonic oscillators, and show that this master equation in general contain…
In the framework of the Lindblad theory for open quantum systems, expressions for the density operator, von Neumann entropy and effective temperature of the damped harmonic oscillator are obtained. The entropy for a state characterized by a Wigner distribution function which is Gaussian in form is found to depend only on the variance of the distribution function. We give a series of inequalities, relating uncertainty to von Neumann entropy and linear entropy. We analyze the conditions for purity of states and show that for a special choice of the diffusion coefficients, the correlated coherent…
The Lindblad equation describes the time evolution of a density matrix of a quantum mechanical system. Stationary solutions are obtained by time-averaging the solution, which will in general depend on the initial state. We provide an analytical expression for the steady states of the Lindblad equation using the quantum jump unraveling, a version of an ergodic theorem, and the stationary probabilities of the corresponding discret-time Markov chains. Our result is valid when the number of states appearing the in quantum trajectory is finite. The classical case of a Markov jump-process is recover…
We consider a time-dependent small quantum system weakly coupled to an environnement, whose effective dynamics we address by means of a Lindblad equation. We assume the Hamiltonian part of the Lindbladian is slowly varying in time and the dissipator part has small amplitude. We study the properties of the evolved state of the small system as the adiabatic parameter and coupling constant both go to zero, in various asymptotic regimes. In particular, we analyse the deviations of the transition probabilities of the small system between the instantaneous eigenspaces of the Hamiltonian with respect…
The optomechanical state transfer protocol provides effective, lossy, quantum beam-splitter-like dynamics where the strength of the coupling between the electromagnetic and mechanical modes is controlled by the optical steady-state amplitude. By restricting to a subspace with no losses, we argue that the transition from mode-hybridization in the strong coupling regime to the damped-dynamics in the weak coupling regime, is a signature of the passive parity-time ($\mathcal{PT}$) symmetry breaking transition in the underlying non-Hermitian quantum dimer. We compare the dynamics generated by the q…
Certain intriguing consequences of the discreteness of time on the time evolution of dynamical systems are discussed. In the discrete-time classical mechanics proposed here, there is an {\it arrow of time} that follows from the fact that the replacement of the time derivative by the backward difference operator alone can preserve the non-negativity of the phase space density. It is seen that, even for free particles, all the degrees of freedom are {\it correlated} in principle. The forward evolution of functions of phase space variables by a finite number of time steps, in this discrete-time m…
We present a derivation of the Lindblad equation - an important tool for the treatment of non-unitary evolutions - that is accessible to undergraduate students in physics or mathematics with a basic background on quantum mechanics. We consider a specific case, corresponding to a very simple situation, where a primary system interacts with a bath of harmonic oscillators at zero temperature, with an interaction Hamiltonian that resembles the Jaynes-Cummings format. We start with the Born-Markov equation and, tracing out the bath degrees of freedom, we obtain an equation in the Lindblad form. The…
Digital Quantum Simulation of the Lindblad Master Equation and Its Nonlinear Extensions via Quantum Trajectory Averaging
Beijing National Laboratory for Condensed Matter Physics, Institute of Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院物理研究所凝聚态物理北京国家实验室）；Center on Frontiers of Computing Studies, School of Computer Science, Peking University（北京大学计算机科学与技术学院前沿计算研究中心）；School of Physical Sciences, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学物理科学学院）；Beijing Academy of Quantum Information Sciences（北京量子信息科学研究院）；Hefei National Laboratory（合肥国家实验室）
In this paper I investigate the usability of the characteristic functions for the description of the dynamics of open quantum systems focussing on non-Lindblad-type master equations. I consider, as an example, a non-Markovian generalized master equation containing a memory kernel which may lead to nonphysical time evolutions characterized by negative values of the density matrix diagonal elements [S.M. Barnett and S. Stenholm, Phys. Rev. A {\bf 64}, 033808 (2001)]. The main result of the paper is to demonstrate that there exist situations in which the symmetrically ordered characteristic funct…
Similar to its classical version, quantum Markovian evolution can be either time-discrete or time-continuous. Discrete quantum Markovian evolution is usually modeled with completely-positive trace-preserving maps while time-continuous evolution is often specified with superoperators referred to as "Lindbladians". Here we address the following question: Being given a quantum map, can we find a Lindbladian which generates an evolution identical -- when monitored at discrete instances of time -- to the one induced by the map? It was demonstrated that the problem of getting the answer to this ques…
We present a general formalism based on the variational principle for finding the time-optimal quantum evolution of mixed states governed by a master equation, when the Hamiltonian and the Lindblad operators are subject to certain constraints. The problem reduces to solving first a fundamental equation (the {\it quantum brachistochrone}) for the Hamiltonian, which can be written down once the constraints are specified, and then solving the constraints and the master equation for the Lindblad and the density operators. As an application of our formalism, we study a simple one-qubit model where …
Semigroups describing the time evolution of open quantum systems in finite dimensional spaces have generators of a special form, known as Lindblad generators. The simple generators, characterized by only one operator, are analyzed. The complete set of all the stationary states is presented in detail, including a formula to calculate a stationary state from the generating operator. Also the opposite task can be fulfilled, to construct an evolution leading to a prescribed stationary state.
In the framework of the Lindblad theory for open quantum systems, we derive closed analytical expressions of the Heisenberg and Schrödinger generalized uncertainty functions for a particle moving in a harmonic oscillator potential. The particle is initially in an arbitrary correlated coherent state, and interacts with an environment at finite temperature. We describe how the quantum and thermal fluctuations contribute to the uncertainties in the canonical variables of the system and analyze the relative importance of these fluctuations in the evolution of the system. We show that upon contact …
An important issue in developing quantum technology is that quantum states are so sensitive to noise. We propose a protocol that introduces reverse dynamics, in order to precisely control quantum systems against noise described by the Lindblad master equation. The reverse dynamics can be obtained by constructing the Petz recovery map in continuous time. By providing the exact form of the Hamiltonian and jump operators for the reverse dynamics, we explore the potential of utilizing the near-optimal recovery of the Petz map in controlling noisy quantum dynamics. While time-dependent dissipation …
We study the dynamics of entanglement in the quantum Ising chain with dephasing dissipation in a Lindblad master equation form. We consider two unravelings which preserve the Gaussian form of the state, allowing to address large system sizes. The first unraveling gives rise to a quantum-state-diffusion dynamics, while the second one describes a specific form of quantum-jump evolution, suitably constructed to preserve Gaussianity. In the first case we find a crossover from area-law to logarithm-law entanglement scaling and draw the related phase diagram. In the second case we only find logarith…
We consider an open quantum system described by a Lindblad-type master equation with two times-scales. The fast time-scale is strongly dissipative and drives the system towards a low-dimensional decoherence-free space. To perform the adiabatic elimination of this fast relaxation, we propose a geometric asymptotic expansion based on the small positive parameter describing the time-scale separation. This expansion exploits geometric singular perturbation theory and center-manifold techniques. We conjecture that, at any order, it provides an effective slow Lindblad master equation and a completel…
We study the properties of the Lindbladian quantum mechanical evolution of quarkonia with non-Abelian charges (color-singlet and octet) in the quark-gluon plasma. We confirm that heavy quark recoils in the Lindblad equation correctly thermalize quarkonium colorful states within statistical errors from the simulation method. We also demonstrate that the Lindblad equation in the dipole limit can provide an efficient alternative method, which is applicable to a finite time evolution before thermalization and dramatically reduces the numerical cost. Our findings will serve as a foundation for larg…
The dynamics of Gaussian states for open quantum systems described by Lindblad equations can be solved analytically for systems with quadratic Hamiltonians and linear Lindbladians, showing the familiar phenomena of dissipation and decoherence. It is well known that the Lindblad dynamics can be expressed as an ensemble average over stochastic pure-state dynamics, which can be interpreted as individual experimental implementations, where the form of the stochastic dynamics depends on the measurement setup. Here we consider quantum-jump and stochastic Schrödinger dynamics for initially Gaussian s…
Quantum Monte Carlo is one of the most powerful numerical tools for studying nonpeturbative properties of quantum many-body systems. However, its application to real-time problems is limited since the complex and highly-oscillating path-integral weight of the real-time evolution harms the important sampling. % , which is the notorious sign problem. In this Letter, we show that some real-time problems in open fermion systems can be simulated using the quantum Monte Carlo. To this end, we prescribe a mapping between a real-time problem in open quantum systems and a statistical problem in non-Her…
Time-evolution of open, dissipative quantum system is a stochastic process that consists of a series of quantum jumps that take place at random times. Between quantum jumps quantum system idles for some time in a particular quantum state. Based on superfermion/superboson formalism and general Kossakowski- Lindblad master equation for an open quantum system we develop a method to compute distribution of waiting times between quantum jumps. We illustrate the use of the theory by computing waiting time distribution for model Fermi-system in thermodynamic equilibrium.
Optimizing open quantum system evolution is an important step on the way to achieving quantum computing and quantum thermodynamic tasks. In this article, we approach optimisation via variational principles and derive an open quantum system variational algorithm explicitly for Lindblad evolution in Liouville space. As an example of such control over open system evolution, we control the thermalisation of a qubit attached to a thermal Lindbladian bath with a damping rate $γ$. Since thermalisation is an asymptotic process and the variational algorithm we consider is for fixed time, we present a w…
To understand typical dynamics of an open quantum system in continuous time, we introduce an ensemble of random Lindblad operators, which generate Markovian completely positive evolution in the space of density matrices. Spectral properties of these operators, including the shape of the spectrum in the complex plane, are evaluated by using methods of free probabilities and explained with non-Hermitian random matrix models. We also demonstrate universality of the spectral features. The notion of ensemble of random generators of Markovian qauntum evolution constitutes a step towards categorizati…
Using the independent oscillator model with an arbitrary system potential, we derive a quantum Brownian equation assuming a correlated total initial state. Although not of Lindblad form, the equation preserves positivity of the density operator on a restricted set of initial states.
