Environmental Spectral Density Research Articles

Excitation Dynamics in Chain-Mapped Environments

The chain mapping of structured environments is a most powerful tool for the simulation of open quantum system dynamics. Once the environmental bosonic or fermionic degrees of freedom are unitarily rearranged into a one dimensional structure, the full power of Density Matrix Renormalization Group (DMRG) can be exploited. Beside resulting in efficient and numerically exact simulations of open quantum systems dynamics, chain mapping provides an unique perspective on the environment: the interaction between the system and the environment creates perturbations that travel along the one dimensional environment at a finite speed, thus providing a natural notion of light-, or causal-, cone. In this work we investigate the transport of excitations in a chain-mapped bosonic environment. In particular, we explore the relation between the environmental spectral density shape, parameters and temperature, and the dynamics of excitations along the corresponding linear chains of quantum harmonic oscillators. Our analysis unveils fundamental features of the environment evolution, such as localization, percolation and the onset of stationary currents.

Criterion for quantum Zeno and anti-Zeno effects

In this work, we study the decay behavior of a two-level system under the competing influence of a dissipative environment and repetitive measurements. The sign of the second derivative of the environmental spectral density function with respect to the system transition frequency is found to be a sufficient condition to distinguish between the quantum Zeno (negative) and the anti-Zeno (positive) effects raised by the measurements. We check our criterion for practical measurement intervals, which are larger than the conceptual Zeno time, in various environments. In particular, with the Lorentzian spectrum, the quantum Zeno and anti-Zeno phenomena are found to emerge respectively in the near-resonant and off-resonant cases. For the interacting spectra of hydrogenlike atoms, the quantum Zeno effect usually occurs and the anti-Zeno effect can rarely occur unless the transition frequency is close to the cut-off frequency. With a power-law spectrum, we find that sub-Ohmic and super-Ohmic environments lead to the quantum Zeno and anti-Zeno effects, respectively.

Accuracy of dynamical-decoupling-based spectroscopy of Gaussian noise

The fundamental assumption of dynamical decoupling based noise spectroscopy is that the coherence decay rate of qubit (or qubits) driven with a sequence of many pulses, is well approximated by the environmental noise spectrum spanned on frequency comb defined by the sequence. Here we investigate the precise conditions under which this commonly used spectroscopic approach is quantitatively correct. To this end we focus on two representative examples of spectral densities: the long-tailed Lorentzian, and finite-ranged Gaussian---both expected to be encountered when using the qubit for nano-scale nuclear resonance imaging. We have found that, in contrast to Lorentz spectrum, for which the corrections to the standard spectroscopic formulas can easily be made negligible, the spectra with finite range are more challenging to reconstruct accurately. For Gaussian line-shape of environmental spectral density, direct application of the standard dynamical decoupling based spectroscopy leads to erroneous attribution of long-tail behavior to the reconstructed spectrum. Fortunately, artifacts such as this, can be completely avoided with the simple extension to standard reconstruction method.

Temperature Can Enhance Non-Markovianity in Dipolar Bose–Einstein Condensate

We study temperature effects on non-Markovian dynamics in a model of an atomic impurity qubit immersed in a quasi-two-dimensional dipolar Bose–Einstein condensate , which can be described as a pure dephasing spin-boson model. We use the measure proposed by Breuer et al. (Phys Rev Lett 103:210401, 2009) to characterize non-Markovianity of the quantum process and find for larger relative dipole–dipole interaction, properly low temperature can induce the non-Markovianity enhancement. We give an explanation of the non-Markovianity enhancement that raising temperature can increase the sharpness of the temperature-dependent environmental spectral density.

Protecting theSWAPoperation from general and residual errors by continuous dynamical decoupling

We study the occurrence of errors in a continuously decoupled two-qubit state during a $\sqrt{SWAP}$ quantum operation under decoherence. We consider a realization of this quantum gate based on the Heisenberg exchange interaction, which alone suffices for achieving universal quantum computation. Furthermore, we introduce a continuous-dynamical-decoupling scheme that commutes with the Heisenberg Hamiltonian to protect it from the amplitude damping and dephasing errors caused by the system-environment interaction. We consider two error-protection settings. One protects the qubits from both amplitude damping and dephasing errors. The other features the amplitude damping as a residual error and protects the qubits from dephasing errors only. In both settings, we investigate the interaction of qubits with common and independent environments separately. We study how errors affect the entanglement and fidelity for different environmental spectral densities.

Analytic solution for heat flow through a general harmonic network.

We present an analytic expression for the heat current through a general harmonic network coupled with Ohmic reservoirs. We use a method that enables us to express the stationary state of the network in terms of the eigenvectors and eigenvalues of a generalized cubic eigenvalue problem. In this way, we obtain exact formulas for the heat current and the local temperature inside the network. Our method does not rely on the usual assumptions of weak coupling to the environments or on the existence of an infinite cutoff in the environmental spectral densities. We use this method to study nonequilibrium processes without the weak coupling and Markovian approximations. As a first application of our method, we revisit the problem of heat conduction in two- and three-dimensional crystals with binary mass disorder. We complement previous results showing that for small systems the scaling of the heat current with the system size greatly depends on the strength of the interaction between system and reservoirs. This somewhat counterintuitive result seems not to have been noticed before.

Non-Markovianity and Indivisible Quantum dynamics of a Apin-S System

Using a measure for the divisibility of a dynamical map, we study the non-Markovian character of a quantum evolution of a spin-S system, which is in an external field and weakly coupled to a bosonic bath with a certain temperature. The finite-temperature dynamics of the open system is obtained by the time-convolutionless master equation in the secular approximation. Besides the influence of the environmental spectral density function, the external field and low temperatures can affect the quantum non-Markovianity. It is found out that the non-Markovian feature of a dynamical map of a high-dimensional spin system is noticeable in contrast to that of a low-dimension spin system.

Dynamics and Thermodynamics of Linear Quantum Open Systems

We analyze the evolution of the quantum state of networks of quantum oscillators coupled with arbitrary external environments. We show that the reduced density matrix of the network always obeys a local master equation with a simple analytical solution. We use this to study the emergence of thermodynamical laws in the long time regime demonstrating two main results: First, we show that it is impossible to build a quantum absorption refrigerator using linear networks (thus, nonlinearity is an essential resource for such refrigerators recently studied by Levy and Kosloff [Phys. Rev. Lett. 108, 070604 (2012)] and Levy et al. [Phys. Rev. B 85, 061126 (2012)]). Then, we show that the third law imposes constraints on the low frequency behavior of the environmental spectral densities.

Measuring the Spectrum of Colored Noise by Dynamical Decoupling

Decoherence is one of the most important obstacles that must be overcome in quantum information processing. It depends on the qubit-environment coupling strength, but also on the spectral composition of the noise generated by the environment. If the spectral density is known, fighting the effect of decoherence can be made more effective. Applying sequences of inversion pulses to the qubit system, we developed a method for dynamical decoupling noise spectroscopy. We generate effective filter functions that probe the environmental spectral density without requiring assumptions about its shape. Comparing different pulse sequences, we recover the complete spectral density function and distinguish different contributions to the overall decoherence.

Consistent treatment of coherent and incoherent energy transfer dynamics using a variational master equation

We investigate the energy transfer dynamics in a donor-acceptor model by developing a time-local master equation technique based on a variational transformation of the underlying Hamiltonian. The variational transformation allows a minimisation of the Hamiltonian perturbation term dependent on the system parameters, and consequently results in a versatile master equation valid over a range of system-bath coupling strengths, temperatures, and environmental spectral densities. While our formalism reduces to the well-known Redfield, Förster and polaron forms in the appropriate limits, in general it is not equivalent to perturbing in either the system-environment or donor-acceptor coupling strengths, and hence can provide reliable results between these limits as well. Moreover, we show how to include the effects of both environmental correlations and non-equilibrium preparations within the formalism.

Environmentally-induced Rabi oscillations and decoherence in superconducting phase qubits

We study decoherence effects in qubits coupled to environments that exhibit resonant frequencies in their spectral function. We model the coupling of the qubit to its environment via the Caldeira-Leggett formulation of quantum dissipation/coherence, and study the simplest example of decoherence effects in circuits with resonances such as a dc superconducting quantum interference device (SQUID) phase qubit in the presence of an isolation circuit. Using the dc SQUID phase qubit as an example, we obtain two quite general results. First, when the frequency of the qubit is at least two times larger than the resonance frequency of the environmental spectral density (the isolation circuit in the case of a dc SQUID phase qubit), we find that the decoherence time of the qubit is a few orders of magnitude larger than that of the typical Ohmic regime, where the frequency of the qubit is much smaller than the resonance frequency of the spectral density. Second, we show that, when the qubit frequency is nearly the same as the resonant frequency of the environmental spectral density, an oscillatory non-Markovian decay emerges, as the qubit and its environment self-generate Rabi oscillations of characteristic time scales shorter than the decoherence time.

Intrinsic dissipation in nanomechanical resonators due to phonon tunneling

State of the art nanomechanical resonators present quality factors $Q\ensuremath{\sim}{10}^{3}--{10}^{5}$, which are much lower than those that can be naively extrapolated from the behavior of micromechanical resonators. We analyze the dissipation mechanism that arises in nanomechanical beam structures due to the tunneling of mesoscopic phonons between the beam and its supports (known as clamping losses). We derive the environmental force spectral density that determines the quantum Brownian motion of a given resonance. Our treatment is valid for low frequencies and provides the leading contribution in the aspect ratio. This yields fundamental limits for the $Q$ values, which are described by simple scaling laws and are relevant for state of the art experimental structures. In this context, for resonant frequencies in the $0.1--1\phantom{\rule{0.3em}{0ex}}\mathrm{GHz}$ range, while this dissipation mechanism can limit flexural resonators, it is found to be negligible for torsional ones. In the case of structureless three-dimensional supports, the corresponding environmental spectral densities are Ohmic for flexural resonators and super-Ohmic for torsional ones, while for two-dimensional slab supports, they yield $1∕f$ noise. Furthermore, analogous results are established for the case of suspended semiconducting single-walled carbon nanotubes. Finally, we provide a general expression for the spectral density that allows us to extend our treatment to other geometries and illustrate its use by applying it to a microtoroid. Our analysis is relevant for applications in high precision measurements and for the prospects of probing quantum effects in a macroscopic mechanical degree of freedom.

Anomalous Dissipative Quantum Harmonic Oscillator

We investigate the low-temperature statistical properties of a harmonic oscillator coupled to a heat bath, where the low-frequency spectrum vanishes. We obtain the exact result of the zero point energy. Due to the low frequency shortage of environmental oscillators' spectral density, the coordinate and momentum correlation functions decay as τ−4 and τ−6 respectively at zero temperature, where τ is the correlation time. The low-temperature behavior of the mean energy does not violate the third law of thermodynamics, but differs largely from the Ohmic spectrum case.

Decoherence and dissipation in quantum two-state systems

The Brownian dynamics of the density operator for a quantum system interacting with a classical heat bath is described using a stochastic, non-linear Liouville equation obtained from a variational principle. The rate of the noise-induced transitions is expressed as a function of the environmental spectral density, and is discussed for the case of white noise and blackbody radiation. The time-scales of decoherence and dissipation are investigated numerically for a system of two quantum states. These are the ground and first excited state of the center of mass vibrations for a single ion confined in a harmonic trap.

Truncation scheme for double-well systems with Ohmic dissipation.

In this paper we describe how a quantum system consisting of a single extended coordinate q in a double-well potential V(q), which interacts with a dissipative environment, may be systematically reduced (``truncated'') to an equivalent two-state system interacting with a modified environment. Although we concentrate on Ohmic dissipation, the method which we present is also applicable to other types of environmental spectral densities. The truncation scheme is applicable if there exists a wide separation of energy scales in the problem; we discuss the specific conditions which the system and environment must satisfy before such a scheme can be implemented. Our method proceeds by calculating the effects of the high-frequency environmental modes on the bare tunneling matrix element for transitions between the two wells. We are left with an equivalent two-state system with a renormalized tunneling matrix element, interacting with the remaining low-frequency environmental modes. The renormalized tunneling matrix element is calculated using path-integral techniques in a semiclassical approximation. Explicit results are given for a quartic double-well potential in the underdamped and overdamped regimes.