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Even photosynthesis -- the most basic natural phenomenon underlying Life on Earth -- involves the non-trivial processing of excitations at the pico- and femtosecond scales during light-harvesting. The desire to understand such natural phenomena, as well as interpret the output from ultrafast experimental probes, creates an urgent need for accurate quantitative theories of open quantum systems. However it is unclear how best to generalize the well-established assumptions of an isolated system, particularly under non-equilibrium conditions. Here we compare two popular approaches: a description in terms of a direct product of the states of each individual system (i.e. a local approach) versus the use of new states resulting from diagonalizing the whole Hamiltonian (i.e. a global approach). We show that their equivalence fails when the system is open, in particular under the experimentally ubiquitous condition of a temperature gradient. By solving for the steady-state populations and calculating the heat flux as a test observable, we uncover stark differences between the formulations. This divergence highlights the need to establish rigorous ranges of applicability for such methods in modeling nanoscale transfer phenomena -- including during the light-harvesting process in photosynthesis.
We show that for a quantum system coupled to both vibrational and electromagnetic environments, enforcing additivity of their combined influences results in non-equilibrium dynamics that does not respect the Franck-Condon principle. We overcome this
Recent years have seen tremendous progress in the theoretical understanding of quantum systems driven dissipatively by coupling them to different baths at their edges. This was possible because of the concurrent advances in the models used to represe
We analyze some features of alternative Hermitian and quasi-Hermitian quantum descriptions of simple and bipartite compound systems. We show that alternative descriptions of two interacting subsystems are possible if and only if the metric operator o
Understanding out-of-equilibrium quantum dynamics is a critical outstanding problem, with key questions regarding characterizing adiabaticity for applications in quantum technologies. We show how the metric-space approach to quantum mechanics natural
Quantum systems in Fock states do not have a phase. When two or more Bose-Einstein condensates are sent into interferometers, they nevertheless acquire a relative phase under the effect of quantum measurements. The usual explanation relies on spontan