No Arabic abstract
We study the spread of a quantum-mechanical wavepacket in a noisy environment, modeled using a tight-binding Hamiltonian. Despite the coherent dynamics, the fluctuating environment may give rise to diffusive behavior. When correlations between different level-crossing events can be neglected, we use the solution of the Landau-Zener problem to find how the diffusion constant depends on the noise. We also show that when an electric field or external disordered potential is applied to the system, the diffusion constant is suppressed with no drift term arising. The results are relevant to various quantum systems, including exciton diffusion in photosynthesis and electronic transport in solid-state physics.
We employ an adaptation of a strong-disorder renormalization-group technique in order to analyze the ferro-paramagnetic quantum phase transition of Ising chains with aperiodic but deterministic couplings under the action of a transverse field. In the presence of marginal or relevant geometric fluctuations induced by aperiodicity, for which the critical behavior is expected to depart from the Onsager universality class, we derive analytical and asymptotically exact expressions for various critical exponents (including the correlation-length and the magnetization exponents, which are not easily obtainable by other methods), and shed light onto the nature of the ground state structures in the neighborhood of the critical point. The main results obtained by this approach are confirmed by finite-size scaling analyses of numerical calculations based on the free-fermion method.
We study the finite-temperature superfluid transition in a modified two-dimensional (2D) XY model with power-law distributed scratch-like bond disorder. As its exponent decreases, the disorder grows stronger and the mechanism driving the superfluid transition changes from conventional vortex-pair unbinding to a strong randomness criticality (termed scratched-XY criticality) characterized by a non-universal jump of the superfluid stiffness. The existence of the scratched-XY criticality at finite temperature and its description by an asymptotically exact semi-renormalization group theory, previously developed for the superfluid-insulator transition in one-dimensional disordered quantum systems, is numerically proven by designing a model with minimal finite size effects. Possible experimental implementations are discussed.
In simple ferromagnetic quantum Ising models characterized by an effective double-well energy landscape the characteristic tunneling time of path-integral Monte Carlo (PIMC) simulations has been shown to scale as the incoherent quantum-tunneling time, i.e., as $1/Delta^2$, where $Delta$ is the tunneling gap. Since incoherent quantum tunneling is employed by quantum annealers (QAs) to solve optimization problems, this result suggests there is no quantum advantage in using QAs w.r.t. quantum Monte Carlo (QMC) simulations. A counterexample is the recently introduced shamrock model, where topological obstructions cause an exponential slowdown of the PIMC tunneling dynamics with respect to incoherent quantum tunneling, leaving the door open for potential quantum speedup, even for stoquastic models. In this work, we investigate the tunneling time of projective QMC simulations based on the diffusion Monte Carlo (DMC) algorithm without guiding functions, showing that it scales as $1/Delta$, i.e., even more favorably than the incoherent quantum-tunneling time, both in a simple ferromagnetic system and in the more challenging shamrock model. However a careful comparison between the DMC ground-state energies and the exact solution available for the transverse-field Ising chain points at an exponential scaling of the computational cost required to keep a fixed relative error as the system size increases.
In this work we investigate the late-time stationary states of open quantum systems coupled to a thermal reservoir in the strong coupling regime. In general such systems do not necessarily relax to a Boltzmann distribution if the coupling to the thermal reservoir is non-vanishing or equivalently if the relaxation timescales are finite. Using a variety of non-equilibrium formalisms valid for non-Markovian processes, we show that starting from a product state of the closed system = system + environment, with the environment in its thermal state, the open system which results from coarse graining the environment will evolve towards an equilibrium state at late-times. This state can be expressed as the reduced state of the closed system thermal state at the temperature of the environment. For a linear (harmonic) system and environment, which is exactly solvable, we are able to show in a rigorous way that all multi-time correlations of the open system evolve towards those of the closed system thermal state. Multi-time correlations are especially relevant in the non-Markovian regime, since they cannot be generated by the dynamics of the single-time correlations. For more general systems, which cannot be exactly solved, we are able to provide a general proof that all single-time correlations of the open system evolve to those of the closed system thermal state, to first order in the relaxation rates. For the special case of a zero-temperature reservoir, we are able to explicitly construct the reduced closed system thermal state in terms of the environmental correlations.
We introduce a model for diffusion of two classes of particles ($A$ and $B$) with priority: where both species are present in the same site the motion of $A$s takes precedence over that of $B$s. This describes realistic situations in wireless and communication networks. In regular lattices the diffusion of the two species is normal but the $B$ particles are significantly slower, due to the presence of the $A$ particles. From the fraction of sites where the $B$ particles can move freely, which we compute analytically, we derive the diffusion coefficients of the two species. In heterogeneous networks the fraction of sites where $B$ is free decreases exponentially with the degree of the sites. This, coupled with accumulation of particles in high-degree nodes leads to trapping of the low priority particles in scale-free networks.