No Arabic abstract
This Article investigates dissipative preparation of entangled non-equilibrium steady states (NESS). We construct a collision model where the open system consists of two qubits which are coupled to heat reservoirs with different temperatures. The baths are modeled by sequences of qubits interacting with the open system. The model can be studied in different dynamical regimes: with and without environmental memory effects. We report that only a certain bath temperature range allows for entangled NESS. Furthermore, we obtain minimal and maximal critical values for the heat current through the system. Surprisingly, quantum memory effects play a crucial role in the long time limit. First, memory effects broaden the parameter region where quantum correlated NESS may be dissipatively prepared and, secondly, they increase the attainable concurrence. Most remarkably, we find a heat current range that does not only allow but guarantees that the NESS is entangled. Thus, the heat current can witness entanglement of non-equilibrium steady states.
We study the problem of calculating transport properties of interacting quantum systems, specifically electrical and thermal conductivities, by computing the non-equilibrium steady state (NESS) of the system biased by contacts. Our approach is based on the structure of entanglement in the NESS. With reasonable physical assumptions, we show that a NESS close to local equilibrium is lightly entangled and can be represented via a computationally efficient tensor network. We further argue that the NESS may be found by dynamically evolving the system within a manifold of appropriate low entanglement states. A physically realistic law of dynamical evolution is Markovian open system dynamics, or the Lindblad equation. We explore this approach in a well-studied free fermion model where comparisons with the literature are possible. We study both electrical and thermal currents with and without disorder, and compute entropic quantities such as mutual information and conditional mutual information. We conclude with a discussion of the prospects of this approach for the challenging problem of transport in strongly interacting systems, especially those with disorder.
We investigate the steady state properties arising from the open system dynamics described by a memoryless (Markovian) quantum collision model, corresponding to a master equation in the ultra-strong coupling regime. By carefully assessing the work cost of switching on and off the system-environment interaction, we show that only a coupling Hamiltonian in the energy-preserving form drives the system to thermal equilibrium, while any other interaction leads to non-equilibrium steady states that are supported by steady-state currents. These currents provide a neat exemplification of the housekeeping work and heat. Furthermore, we characterize the specific form of system-environment interaction that drives the system to a steady-state exhibiting coherence in the energy eigenbasis, thus, giving rise to families of states that are non-passive.
We consider parameter estimations with probes being the boundary driven/dissipated non- equilibrium steady states of XXZ spin 1/2 chains. The parameters to be estimated are the dissipation coupling and the anisotropy of the spin-spin interaction. In the weak coupling regime we compute the scaling of the Fisher information, i.e. the inverse best sensitivity among all estimators, with the number of spins. We find superlinear scalings and transitions between the distinct, isotropic and anisotropic, phases. We also look at the best relative error which decreases with the number of particles faster than the shot-noise only for the estimation of anisotropy.
We present a general construction of matrix product states for stationary density matrices of one-dimensional quantum spin systems kept out of equilibrium through boundary Lindblad dynamics. As an application we review the isotropic Heisenberg quantum spin chain which is closely related to the generator of the simple symmetric exclusion process. Exact and heuristic results as well as numerical evidence suggest a local quantum equilibrium and long-range correlations reminiscent of similar large-scale properties in classical stochastic interacting particle systems that can be understood in terms of fluctuating hydrodynamics.