No Arabic abstract
Spin chains with open boundaries, such as the transverse field Ising model, can display coherence times for edge spins that diverge with the system size as a consequence of almost conserved operators, the so-called strong zero modes. Here, we discuss the fate of these coherence times when the system is perturbed in two different ways. First, we consider the effects of a unitary coupling connecting the ends of the chain; when the coupling is weak and non-interacting, we observe stable long-lived harmonic oscillations between the strong zero modes. Second, and more interestingly, we consider the case when dynamics becomes dissipative. While in general dissipation induces decoherence and loss of information, here we show that particularly simple environments can actually enhance correlation times beyond those of the purely unitary case. This allows us to generalise the notion of strong zero modes to irreversible Markovian time-evolutions, thus defining conditions for {em dissipative strong zero maps}. Our results show how dissipation could, in principle, play a useful role in protocols for storing information in quantum devices.
We show that in certain one-dimensional spin chains with open boundary conditions, the edge spins retain memory of their initial state for very long times. The long coherence times do not require disorder, only an ordered phase. In the integrable Ising and XYZ chains, the presence of a strong zero mode means the coherence time is infinite, even at infinite temperature. When Ising is perturbed by interactions breaking the integrability, the coherence time remains exponentially long in the perturbing couplings. We show that this is a consequence of an edge almost strong zero mode that almost commutes with the Hamiltonian. We compute this operator explicitly, allowing us to estimate accurately the plateau value of edge spin autocorrelator.
We propose a mechanism for solving the `negative sign problem---the inability to assign non-negative weights to quantum Monte Carlo configurations---for a toy model consisting of a frustrated triplet of spin-$1/2$ particles interacting antiferromagnetically. The introduced technique is based on the systematic grouping of the weights of the recently developed off-diagonal series expansion of the canonical partition function [Phys. Rev. E 96, 063309 (2017)]. We show that while the examined model is easily diagonalizable, the sign problem it encounters can nonetheless be very pronounced, and we offer a systematic mechanism to resolve it. We discuss the generalization of the suggested scheme and the steps required to extend it to more general and larger spin models.
Many thermodynamic relations involve inequalities, with equality if a process does not involve dissipation. In this article we provide equalities in which the dissipative contribution is shown to involve the relative entropy (a.k.a. Kullback-Leibler divergence). The processes considered are general time evolutions both in classical and quantum mechanics, and the initial state is sometimes thermal, sometimes partially so. As an application, the relative entropy is related to transport coefficients.
We analyze the stochastic evolution and dephasing of a qubit within the quantum jump (QJ) approach. It allows one to treat individual realizations of inelastic processes, and in this way it provides solutions, for instance, to problems in quantum thermodynamics and distributions in statistical mechanics. As a solvable example, we study a qubit in the weak dissipation limit, and demonstrate that dephasing and relaxation render the Jarzynski and Crooks fluctuation relations (FRs) of non-equilibrium thermodynamics intact. On the contrary, the standard two-measurement protocol, taking into account only the fluctuations of the internal energy $U$, leads to deviations in FRs under the same conditions. We relate the average $langle e^{-beta U} rangle $ (where $beta$ is the inverse temperature) with the qubits relaxation and dephasing rates, and discuss this relationship for different mechanisms of decoherence.
In this work, we show that the dissipation in a many-body system under an arbitrary non-equilibrium process is related to the R{e}nyi divergences between two states along the forward and reversed dynamics under very general family of initial conditions. This relation generalizes the links between dissipated work and Renyi divergences to quantum systems with conserved quantities whose equilibrium state is described by the generalized Gibbs ensemble. The relation is applicable for quantum systems with conserved quantities and can be applied to protocols driving the system between integrable and chaotic regimes. We demonstrate our ideas by considering the one-dimensional transverse quantum Ising model which is driven out of equilibrium by the instantaneous switching of the transverse magnetic field.