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arXiv:0907.5582 · New Journal of Physics

Exact matrix product solutions in the Heisenberg picture of an open quantum spin chain

S R Clark, J Prior, M J Hartmann, D Jaksch, Martin Bodo Plenio

Published Feb 26, 2010• 53 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

In recent work, Hartmann et al (2009 Phys. Rev. Lett. 102 057202) demonstrated that the classical simulation of the dynamics of open 1D quantum systems with matrix product algorithms can often be dramatically improved by performing time evolution in the Heisenberg picture. For a closed system this was exemplified by an exact matrix product operator (MPO) solution of the time-evolved creation operator of a quadratic fermi chain with a matrix dimension of just two. In this work, we show that this exact solution can be significantly generalized to include the case of an open quadratic fermi chain subjected to master equation evolution with Lindblad operators that are linear in the fermionic operators. Remarkably even in this open system the time evolution of operators continues to be described by MPOs with the same fixed dimension as that required by the solution of a coherent quadratic fermi chain for all times. Through the use of matrix product algorithms the dynamical behaviour of operators in this non-equilibrium open quantum system can be computed with a cost that is linear in the system size. We present some simple numerical examples that highlight how useful this might be for the more detailed study of open system dynamics. Given that Heisenberg picture simulations have been demonstrated to offer significant accuracy improvements for other open systems that are not exactly solvable, our work also provides further insight into how and why this advantage arises.

DOI
10.1088/1367-2630/12/2/025005

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In recent work, Hartmann et al (2009 Phys. Rev. Lett. 102 057202) demonstrated that the classical simulation of the dynamics of open 1D quantum systems with matrix product algorithms can often be dramatically improved by performing time evolution in the Heisenberg picture. For a closed system this was exemplified by an exact matrix product operator (MPO) solution of the time-evolved creation operator of a quadratic fermi chain with a matrix dimension of just two. In this work, we show that this exact solution can be significantly generalized to include the case of an open quadratic fermi chain subjected to master equation evolution with Lindblad operators that are linear in the fermionic operators. Remarkably even in this open system the time evolution of operators continues to be described by MPOs with the same fixed dimension as that required by the solution of a coherent quadratic fermi chain for all times. Through the use of matrix product algorithms the dynamical behaviour of operators in this non-equilibrium open quantum system can be computed with a cost that is linear in the system size. We present some simple numerical examples that highlight how useful this might be for the more detailed study of open system dynamics. Given that Heisenberg picture simulations have been demonstrated to offer significant accuracy improvements for other open systems that are not exactly solvable, our work also provides further insight into how and why this advantage arises.
n recent work, Hartmann et al (2009 Phys. Rev. Lett. 102 057202) demonstrated that the classical simulation of the dynamics of open 1D quantum systems with matrix product algorithms can often be dramatically improved by performing time evolution in the Heisenberg picture. For a closed system this was exemplified by an exact matrix product operator (MPO) solution of the time-evolved creation operator of a quadratic fermi chain with a matrix dimension of just two. In this work, we show that this exact solution can be significantly generalized to include the case of an open quadratic fermi chain subjected to master equation evolution with Lindblad operators that are linear in the fermionic operators. Remarkably even in this open system the time evolution of operators continues to be described by MPOs with the same fixed dimension as that required by the solution of a coherent quadratic fermi chain for all times. Through the use of matrix product algorithms the dynamical behaviour of operators in this non-equilibrium open quantum system can be computed with a cost that is linear in the system size. We present some simple numerical examples that highlight how useful this might be for the more detailed study of open system dynamics. Given that Heisenberg picture simulations have been demonstrated to offer significant accuracy improvements for other open systems that are not exactly solvable, our work also provides further insight into how and why this advantage arises.
We demonstrate that the exact nonequilibrium steady state of the one-dimensional Heisenberg XXZ spin chain driven by boundary Lindblad operators can be constructed explicitly with a matrix product ansatz for the nonequilibrium density matrix where the matrices satisfy a quadratic algebra. This algebra turns out to be related to the quantum algebra U(q)[SU(2)]. Coherent state techniques are introduced for the exact solution of the isotropic Heisenberg chain with and without quantum boundary fields and Lindblad terms that correspond to two different completely polarized boundary states. We show that this boundary twist leads to nonvanishing stationary currents of all spin components. Our results suggest that the matrix product ansatz can be extended to more general quantum systems kept far from equilibrium by Lindblad boundary terms.
In the thesis we present an analytic approach towards exact description for steady state density operators of nonequilibrium quantum dynamics in the framework of open systems. We employ the so-called quantum Markovian semi-group evolution, i.e. a general form of time-autonomous positivity and trace-preserving dynamical equation for reduced density operators, by only allowing unitarity-breaking dissipative terms acting at the boundaries of a system. Such setup enables to simulate macroscopic reservoirs for different values of effective thermodynamic potentials, causing incoherent transitions between quantum states which are modeled with aid of the Lindblad operators. This serves as a simple minimalistic model for studying quantum transport properties, either in the linear response domain or in more general regimes far from canonical equilibrium. We are mainly exploring possibilities of identifying nonequilibrium situations which are amenable to exact description within matrix product state representation, by exclusively focusing on steady states, i.e. fixed points of the Lindblad equation, of certain prototypic interacting integrable spin chains driven by incoherent polarizing processes. Finally, we define a concept of pseudo-local extensive almost-conserved quantities by allowing a violation of time-invariance up to boundary-localized terms. We elucidate the role of such quantities on non-ergodic behaviour of temporal correlation functions rendering anomalous transport properties. It turns out that such conservation laws can be generated by means of boundary universal quantum transfer operators of the fundamental integrable models.
Using the Density Matrix Renormalization Group (DMRG) one can simulate spin systems without the computation time growing as 2 , making it feasible to simulate large systems. In this paper, the impact of using the DMRG in the Schrodinger picture and in the Heisenberg picture is investigated for three different models, a spin1 2 XX chain, a spin1 2 XXZ chain and a Bose-Hubbard model. Simulations in the Heisenberg model will turn out to perform better only in the XX chain for certain operators. For all the other tested models, the Schrodinger picture is to be preferred. We will also try to shed some light on why the simulations in the Heisenberg picture fail so quickly.
We devise a numerical scheme for the time evolution of matrix product operators by adapting the time-dependent variational principle for matrix product states [J. Haegeman et al, Phys. Rev. B 94, 165116 (2016)]. A simple augmentation of the initial operator O\mathcal{O}O by the Hamiltonian HHH helps to conserve the average energy tr[HO(t)]\mathrm{tr}[H \mathcal{O}(t)]tr[HO(t)] in the numerical scheme and increases the overall precision. As demonstration, we apply the improved method to a random operator on a small one-dimensional lattice, using the spin-1 Heisenberg XXZ model Hamiltonian; we observe that the augmentation reduces the trace-distance to the numerically exact time-evolved operator by a factor of 10, at the same computational cost.
The process tensor framework to open quantum systems provides the most general description of multi-time correlations in non-Markovian quantum dynamics. A compressed representation of a process tensor in terms of matrix product operators (MPO) can be used for numerically exact calculations of multi-time correlation functions in systems strongly coupled to a non-Markovian reservoir. We show here that the numerical scaling for computing multi-dimensional spectra can be significantly improved using a time-translation invariant MPO representation of the process tensor obtained from the uniform time-evolving matrix product operator (uniTEMPO) method. In particular, this approach provides a spectral representation of the non-Markovian dynamics that gives direct access to correlation functions in Fourier-space, avoiding explicit real-time evolution. We calculate linear and 2D electronic spectra for an example system and discuss the performance and numerical scaling of our simulations.