No Arabic abstract
We consider a composite open quantum system consisting of a fast subsystem coupled to a slow one. Using the time-scale separation, we develop an adiabatic elimination technique to derive at any order the reduced model describing the slow subsystem. The method, based on an asymptotic expansion and geometric singular perturbation theory, ensures the physical interpretation of the reduced second-order model by giving the reduced dynamics in a Lindblad form and the state reduction in Kraus map form. We give explicit second-order formulas for Hamiltonian or cascade coupling between the two subsystems. These formulas can be used to engineer, via a careful choice of the fast subsystem, the Hamiltonian and Lindbald operators governing the dissipative dynamics of the slow subsystem.
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 completely positive parameterization of the slow invariant sub-manifold associated to the low-dimensional decoherence-free space. By preserving complete positivity and trace, two important structural properties attached to open quantum dynamics, we obtain a reduced-order model that directly conveys a physical interpretation since it relies on effective Lindbladian descriptions of the slow evolution. At the first order, we derive simple formulae for the effective Lindblad master equation. For a specific type of fast dissipation, we show how any Hamiltonian perturbation yields Lindbladian second-order corrections to the first-order slow evolution governed by the Zeno-Hamiltonian. These results are illustrated on a composite system made of a strongly dissipative harmonic oscillator, the ancilla, weakly coupled to another quantum system.
It was recently shown that, for solving NP-complete problems, adiabatic paths always exist without finite-order perturbative crossings between local and global minima, which could lead to anticrossings with exponentially small energy gaps if present. However, it was not shown whether such a path could be found easily. Here, we give a simple construction that deterministically eliminates all such anticrossings in polynomial time, space, and energy, for any Ising models with polynomial final gap. Thus, in order for adiabatic quantum optimization to require exponential time to solve any NP-complete problem, some quality other than this type of anticrossing must be unavoidable and necessitate exponentially long runtimes.
We study the adiabatic-impulse approximation (AIA) as a tool to approximate the time evolution of quantum states, when driven through a region of small gap. The AIA originates from the Kibble-Zurek theory applied to continuous quantum phase transitions. The Kibble-Zurek mechanism was developed to predict the power-law scaling of the defect density across a continuous quantum phase transition. Instead here, we quantify the accuracy of the AIA via the trace norm distance with respect to the exact evolved state. As expected, we find that for short times/fast protocols, the AIA outperforms the simple adiabatic approximation. However, for large times/slow protocols, the situation is actually reversed and the AIA provides a worse approximation. Nevertheless, we found a variation of the AIA that can perform better than the adiabatic one. This counter-intuitive modification consists in crossing twice the region of small gap. Our findings are illustrated by several examples of driven closed and open quantum systems.
We restate the adiabatic elimination approximation as the first term in a singular perturbation expansion. We use the invariant manifold formalism for singular perturbations in dynamical systems to identify systematic improvements on adiabatic elimination, connecting with well established quantum mechanical perturbation methods. We prove convergence of the expansions when energy scales are well separated. We state and solve the problem of hermiticity of improved effective hamiltonians.
We demonstrate in straightforward calculations that even under ideally weak noise the relaxation of bipartite open quantum systems contains elements not previously encountered in quantum noise physics. While additivity of decay rates is known to be generic for decoherence of a single system, we demonstrate that it breaks down for bipartite coherence of even the simplest composite systems.