No Arabic abstract
We investigate the time evolution of an open quantum system described by a Lindblad master equation with dissipation acting only on a part of the degrees of freedom ${cal H}_0$ of the system, and targeting a unique dark state in ${cal H}_0$. We show that, in the Zeno limit of large dissipation, the density matrix of the system traced over the dissipative subspace ${cal H}_0$, evolves according to another Lindblad dynamics, with renormalized effective Hamiltonian and weak effective dissipation. This behavior is explicitly checked in the case of Heisenberg spin chains with one or both boundary spins strongly coupled to a magnetic reservoir. Moreover, the populations of the eigenstates of the renormalized effective Hamiltonian evolve in time according to a classical Markov dynamics. As a direct application of this result, we propose a computationally-efficient exact method to evaluate the nonequilibrium steady state of a general system in the limit of strong dissipation.
We show that the time evolution of an open quantum system, described by a possibly time dependent Liouvillian, can be simulated by a unitary quantum circuit of a size scaling polynomially in the simulation time and the size of the system. An immediate consequence is that dissipative quantum computing is no more powerful than the unitary circuit model. Our result can be seen as a dissipative Church-Turing theorem, since it implies that under natural assumptions, such as weak coupling to an environment, the dynamics of an open quantum system can be simulated efficiently on a quantum computer. Formally, we introduce a Trotter decomposition for Liouvillian dynamics and give explicit error bounds. This constitutes a practical tool for numerical simulations, e.g., using matrix-product operators. We also demonstrate that most quantum states cannot be prepared efficiently.
Modeling the dynamics of a quantum system connected to the environment is critical for advancing our understanding of complex quantum processes, as most quantum processes in nature are affected by an environment. Modeling a macroscopic environment on a quantum simulator may be achieved by coupling independent ancilla qubits that facilitate energy exchange in an appropriate manner with the system and mimic an environment. This approach requires a large, and possibly exponential number of ancillary degrees of freedom which is impractical. In contrast, we develop a digital quantum algorithm that simulates interaction with an environment using a small number of ancilla qubits. By combining periodic modulation of the ancilla energies, or spectral combing, with periodic reset operations, we are able to mimic interaction with a large environment and generate thermal states of interacting many-body systems. We evaluate the algorithm by simulating preparation of thermal states of the transverse Ising model. Our algorithm can also be viewed as a quantum Markov chain Monte Carlo (QMCMC) process that allows sampling of the Gibbs distribution of a multivariate model. To demonstrate this we evaluate the accuracy of sampling Gibbs distributions of simple probabilistic graphical models using the algorithm.
If an open quantum system is initially uncorrelated from its environment, then its dynamics can be written in terms of a Lindblad-form master equation. The master equation is divided into a unitary piece, represented by an effective Hamiltonian, and a dissipative piece, represented by a hermiticity-preserving superoperator; however, the division of open system dynamics into unitary and dissipative pieces is non-unique. For finite-dimensional quantum systems, we resolve this non-uniqueness by specifying a norm on the space of dissipative superoperators and defining the canonical Hamiltonian to be the one whose dissipator is minimal. We show that the canonical Hamiltonian thus defined is equivalent to the Hamiltonian initially defined by Lindblad, and that it is uniquely specified by requiring the dissipators jump operators to be traceless. For a system weakly coupled to its environment, we give a recursive formula for computing the canonical effective Hamiltonian to arbitrary orders in perturbation theory, which we can think of as a perturbative scheme for renormalizing the systems bare Hamiltonian.
We consider the evolution of an arbitrary quantum dynamical semigroup of a finite-dimensional quantum system under frequent kicks, where each kick is a generic quantum operation. We develop a generalization of the Baker-Campbell-Hausdorff formula allowing to reformulate such pulsed dynamics as a continuous one. This reveals an adiabatic evolution. We obtain a general type of quantum Zeno dynamics, which unifies all known manifestations in the literature as well as describing new types.
It is well known that the quantum Zeno effect can protect specific quantum states from decoherence by using projective measurements. Here we combine the theory of weak measurements with stabilizer quantum error correction and detection codes. We derive rigorous performance bounds which demonstrate that the Zeno effect can be used to protect appropriately encoded arbitrary states to arbitrary accuracy, while at the same time allowing for universal quantum computation or quantum control.