No Arabic abstract
We propose a generalization of the linked-cluster expansions to study driven-dissipative quantum lattice models, directly accessing the thermodynamic limit of the system. Our method leads to the evaluation of the desired extensive property onto small connected clusters of a given size and topology. We first test this approach on the isotropic spin-1/2 Hamiltonian in two dimensions, where each spin is coupled to an independent environment that induces incoherent spin flips. Then we apply it to the study of an anisotropic model displaying a dissipative phase transition from a magnetically ordered to a disordered phase. By means of a Pade analysis on the series expansions for the average magnetization, we provide a viable route to locate the phase transition and to extrapolate the critical exponent for the magnetic susceptibility.
We develop a numerical linked cluster expansion (NLCE) method that can be applied directly to inhomogeneous systems, for example Hamiltonians with disorder and dynamics initiated from inhomogeneous initial states. We demonstrate the method by calculating dynamics for single-spin expectations and spin correlations in two-dimensional spin models on a square lattice, starting from a checkerboard state. We show that NLCE can give moderate to dramatic improvement over an exact diagonalization of comparable computational cost, and that the advantage in computational resources grows exponentially as the size of the clusters included grows. Although the method applies to any type of NLCE, our explicit benchmarks use the rectangle expansion. Besides showing the capability to treat inhomogeneous systems, these benchmarks demonstrate the rectangle expansions utility out of equilibrium.
We identify a fundamental challenge for non-perturbative linked cluster expansions (NLCEs) resulting from the reduced symmetry on graphs, most importantly the breaking of translational symmetry, when targeting the properties of excited states. A generalized notion of cluster additivity is introduced, which is used to formulate an optimized scheme of graph-based continuous unitary transformations (gCUTs) allowing to solve and to physically understand this fundamental challenge. Most importantly, it demands to go beyond the paradigm of using the exact eigenvectors on graphs.
We analyse dynamical large deviations of quantum trajectories in Markovian open quantum systems in their full generality. We derive a {em quantum level-2.5 large deviation principle} for these systems, which describes the joint fluctuations of time-averaged quantum jump rates and of the time-averaged quantum state for long times. Like its level-2.5 counterpart for classical continuous-time Markov chains (which it contains as a special case) this description is both {em explicit and complete}, as the statistics of arbitrary time-extensive dynamical observables can be obtained by contraction from the explicit level-2.5 rate functional we derive. Our approach uses an unravelled representation of the quantum dynamics which allows these statistics to be obtained by analysing a classical stochastic process in the space of pure states. For quantum reset processes we show that the unravelled dynamics is semi-Markov, and derive bounds on the asymptotic variance of the number of quantum jumps which generalise classical thermodynamic uncertainty relations. We finish by discussing how our level-2.5 approach can be used to study large deviations of non-linear functions of the state such as measures of entanglement.
We study the quantum dynamics of many-body systems, in the presence of dissipation due to the interaction with the environment, under Kibble-Zurek (KZ) protocols in which one Hamiltonian parameter is slowly, and linearly in time, driven across the critical value of a zero-temperature quantum transition. In particular we address whether, and under which conditions, open quantum systems can develop a universal dynamic scaling regime similar to that emerging in closed systems. We focus on a class of dissipative mechanisms whose dynamics can be reliably described through a Lindblad master equation governing the time evolution of the systems density matrix. We argue that a dynamic scaling limit exists even in the presence of dissipation, whose main features are controlled by the universality class of the quantum transition. This requires a particular tuning of the dissipative interactions, whose decay rate $u$ should scale as $usim t_s^{-kappa}$ with increasing the time scale $t_s$ of the KZ protocol, where the exponent $kappa = z/(y_mu+z)$ depends on the dynamic exponent $z$ and the renormalization-group dimension $y_mu$ of the driving Hamiltonian parameter. Our dynamic scaling arguments are supported by numerical results for KZ protocols applied to a one-dimensional fermionic wire undergoing a quantum transition in the same universality class of the quantum Ising chain, in the presence of dissipative mechanisms which include local pumping, decay, and dephasing.
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.