No Arabic abstract
It is very common in the literature to write down a Markovian quantum master equation in Lindblad form to describe a system with multiple degrees of freedom and weakly connected to multiple thermal baths which can, in general, be at different temperatures and chemical potentials. However, the microscopically derived quantum master equation up to leading order in system-bath coupling is of the so-called Redfield form which is known to not preserve complete positivity in most cases. We analytically show that, in such cases, enforcing complete positivity by imposing any Lindblad form, via any further approximation, necessarily leads to either violation of thermalization, or inaccurate coherences in the energy eigenbasis which then cause a violation of local conservation laws in the non-equilibrium steady state (NESS). In other words, a weak system-bath coupling quantum master equation that is completely positive, shows thermalization and preserves local conservation laws in NESS is fundamentally impossible in generic situations. On the other hand, the Redfield equation, although generically not completely positive, shows thermalization, always preserves local conservation laws and gives correct coherences to leading order. We exemplify our analytical results numerically in an interacting open quantum spin system.
An open quantum system that is put in contact with an infinite bath is pushed towards equilibrium, while the state of the bath remains unchanged. If the bath is finite, the open system still relaxes to equilibrium, but it induces a dynamical evolution of the bath state. In this work, we extend the weak-coupling master equation approach of open quantum systems interacting with finite baths to include imprecise measurements of the bath energy. Those imprecise measurements are not only always the case in practice, but they also unify the theoretical description. We investigate the circumstances under which our equation reduces to the more standard Born-Markov-secular master equation. As a result, we obtain a hierarchy of master equations that improve their accuracy by including more dynamical information about the bath. We discuss this formalism in detail for a particular non-interacting environment where the Boltzmann temperature and the Kubo-Martin-Schwinger relation naturally arise. Finally, we apply our hierarchy of master equations to study the central spin model.
We investigate the influence of a weakly nonlinear Josephson bath consisting of a chain of Josephson junctions on the dynamics of a small quantum system (LC oscillator). Focusing on the regime where the charging energy is the largest energy scale, we perturbatively calculate the correlation function of the Josephson bath to the leading order in the Josephson energy divided by the charging energy while keeping the cosine potential exactly. When the variation of the charging energy along the chain ensures fast decay of the bath correlation function, the dynamics of the LC oscillator that is weakly and capacitively coupled to the Josephson bath can be solved through the Markovian master equation. We establish a duality relation for the Josephson bath between the regimes of large charging and Josephson energies respectively. The results can be applied to cases where the charging energy either is nonuniformly engineered or disordered in the chain. Furthermore, we find that the Josephson bath may become non-Markovian when the temperature is increased beyond the zero-temperature limit in that the bath correlation function gets shifted by a constant and does not decay with time.
In this Comment, we show that the thermal Gibbs state given in terms of a time-independent system Hamiltonian is not a steady state solution of the quantum master equation introduced by Nathan and Rudner [Phys. Rev. B 102, 115109 (2020)], in contrast to their claim.
We experimentally demonstrate high degree of polarization of 13C nuclear spins weakly interacting with nitrogen-vacancy (NV) centers in diamond. We combine coherent microwave excitation pulses with optical illumination to provide controlled relaxation and achieve a polarity-tunable, fast nuclear polarization of degree higher than 85% at room temperature for remote 13C nuclear spins exhibiting hyperfine interaction strength with NV centers of the order of 600 kHz. We show with the aid of numerical simulation that the anisotropic hyperfine tensor components naturally provide a route to control spin mixing parameter so that highly efficient nuclear polarization is enabled through careful tuning of nuclear quantization axis by external magnetic field. We further discuss spin dynamics and wide applicability of this method to various target 13C nuclear spins around the NV center electron spin. The proposed control method demonstrates an efficient and versatile route to realize, for example, high-fidelity spin register initialization and quantum metrology using nuclear spin resources in solids.
As the dimensions of physical systems approach the nanoscale, the laws of thermodynamics must be reconsidered due to the increased importance of fluctuations and quantum effects. While the statistical mechanics of small classical systems is relatively well understood, the quantum case still poses challenges. Here we set up a formalism that allows to calculate the full probability distribution of energy exchanges between a periodically driven quantum system and a thermalized heat reservoir. The formalism combines Floquet theory with a generalized master equation approach. For a driven two-level system and in the long-time limit, we obtain a universal expression for the distribution, providing clear physical insight into the exchanged energy quanta. We illustrate our approach in two analytically solvable cases and discuss the differences in the corresponding distributions. Our predictions could be directly tested in a variety of systems, including optical cavities and solid-state devices.