Non-Markovian effects in the evolution of open quantum systems have recently attracted widespread interest, particularly in the context of assessing the efficiency of energy and charge transfer in nanoscale biomolecular networks and quantum technolog
ies. With the aid of many-body simulation methods, we uncover and analyse an ultrafast environmental process that causes energy relaxation in the reduced system to depend explicitly on the phase relation of the initial state preparation. Remarkably, for particular phases and system parameters, the net energy flow is uphill, transiently violating the principle of detailed balance, and implying that energy is spontaneously taken up from the environment. A theoretical analysis reveals that non-secular contributions, significant only within the environmental correlation time, underlie this effect. This suggests that environmental energy harvesting will be observable across a wide range of coupled quantum systems.
Recent observations of beating signals in the excitation energy transfer dynamics of photosynthetic complexes have been interpreted as evidence for sustained coherences that are sufficiently long-lived for energy transport and coherence to coexist. T
he possibility that coherence may be exploited in biological processes has opened up new avenues of exploration at the interface of physics and biology. The microscopic origin of these long-lived coherences, however, remains to be uncovered. Here we present such a mechanism and verify it by numerically exact simulations of system-environment dynamics. Crucially, the non-trivial spectral structures of the environmental fluctuations and particularly discrete vibrational modes can lead to the generation and sustenance of both oscillatory energy transport and electronic coherence on timescales that are comparable to excitation energy transport. This suggests that the non-trivial structure of protein environments plays a more significant role for coherence in biological processes than previously believed.
The sub-ohmic spin-boson model is known to possess a novel quantum phase transition at zero temperature between a localised and delocalised phase. We present here an analytical theory based on a variational ansatz for the ground state, which describe
s a continuous localization transition with mean-field exponents for $0<s<0.5$. Our results for the critical properties show good quantitiative agreement with previous numerical results, and we present a detailed description of all the spin observables as the system passes through the transition. Analysing the ansatz itself, we give an intuitive microscopic description of the transition in terms of the changing correlations between the system and bath, and show that it is always accompanied by a divergence of the low-frequency boson occupations. The possible relevance of this divergence for some numerical approaches to this problem is discussed and illustrated by looking at the ground state obtained using density matrix renormalisation group methods.
We have studied the conductance distribution function of two-dimensional disordered noninteracting systems in the crossover regime between the diffusive and the localized phases. The distribution is entirely determined by the mean conductance, g, in
agreement with the strong version of the single-parameter scaling hypothesis. The distribution seems to change drastically at a critical value very close to one. For conductances larger than this critical value, the distribution is roughly Gaussian while for smaller values it resembles a log-normal distribution. The two distributions match at the critical point with an often appreciable change in behavior. This matching implies a jump in the first derivative of the distribution which does not seem to disappear as system size increases. We have also studied 1/g corrections to the skewness to quantify the deviation of the distribution from a Gaussian function in the diffusive regime.
