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arXiv:1012.4594 · Physical Review Letters

Generation of Macroscopic Superpositions of Quantum States by Linear Coupling to a Bath

D. D. Bhaktavatsala Rao, Nir Bar‐Gill, Gershon Kurizki

Published Jan 7, 2011• 29 citations
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Abstract

We demonstrate through an exactly solvable model that collective coupling to any thermal bath induces effectively nonlinear couplings in a quantum many-body (multispin) system. The resulting evolution can drive an uncorrelated large-spin system with high probability into a macroscopic quantum-superposition state. We discuss possible experimental realizations.

DOI
10.1103/physrevlett.106.010404

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We demonstrate through an exactly solvable model that collective coupling to any thermal bath induces effectively nonlinear couplings in a quantum many-body (multispin) system. The resulting evolution can drive an uncorrelated large-spin system with high probability into a macroscopic quantum-superposition state. We discuss possible experimental realizations.
"As a rule, the coupling of a quantum system to an uncontrollable thermal reservoir (a “bath”) gives rise to the system’s decoherence, i.e., the destruction of its unitary coherent evolution [1]. Not less common is the rule that the more complex the quantum system, the more detrimental are the bath effects [2]. Here we point out that the coupling of a complex quantum system to a bath may actually induce advantageous coherent dynamics. Namely, an exact solution for a quantum many-body system characterized by large angular momentum (or spin) that is coupled to a thermal bath reveals a hitherto unexplored general effect: bath-induced effectively nonlinear evolution. This evolution can drive the large-spin system into a macroscopic quantum-superposition (“Schroedinger-cat”) state [3, 4]. Such counter-intuitive bath-induced effects should be observable in various setups on long (Markovian) time scales. They change our perspective of non-classicality in open many-body quantum systems. Namely, the bath may cause rather than impede the formation of distinctly non-classical Schroedinger-cat states, despite their fragility in the presence of a bath [2, 5]."
Decoherence of a center spin or qubit in a spin bath is essentially determined by the many-body bath evolution. We develop a cluster-correlation expansion (CCE) theory for the spin-bath dynamics relevant to the qubit decoherence problem. A cluster-correlation term is recursively defined as the evolution of a group of bath spins divided by the cluster correlations of all the subgroups. This correlation accounts for the authentic (nonfactorizable) collective excitations within a given group. The bath propagator is the product of all possible cluster correlation terms. For a finite-time evolution as in the qubit decoherence problem, a convergent result can be obtained by truncating the expansion up to a certain cluster size. The two-spin cluster truncation of the CCE corresponds to the pair-correlation approximation developed previously [W. Yao et al., Phys. Rev. B 74, 195301 (2006)]. In terms of the standard linked cluster expansion, a cluster-correlation term is the infinite summation of all the connected diagrams with all and only the spins in the group flip-flopped, and thus the expansion is exact whenever convergence occurs. When the individual contribution of each higher-order correlation term to the decoherence is small (while all the terms combined in product could still contribute substantially), as the usual case for relatively large baths, where the decoherence could complete well within the bath spin flip-flop time, the CCE coincides with the cluster expansion [W. M. Witzel and S. Das Sarma, Phys. Rev. B 74, 035322 (2006)]. For small baths, however, the qubit decoherence may not complete within the bath spin flip-flop time scale and thus individual higher-order cluster correlations could become significant. In such cases, only the CCE converges to the exact coherent dynamics of multispin clusters. We check the accuracy of the CCE in an exactly solvable spin-chain model.
We study a quantum interacting spin system subject to an external drive and coupled to a thermal bath of vibrational modes, uncorrelated for different spins, serving as a model for dynamic nuclear polarization protocols. We show that even when the many-body eigenstates of the system are ergodic, a sufficiently strong coupling to the bath may effectively localize the spins due to many-body quantum Zeno effect. Our results provide an explanation of the breakdown of the thermal mixing regime experimentally observed above 4-5 K in these protocols.
We propose a scheme to generate macroscopic superposition states (MSSs) in spin ensembles, where a coherent driving field is applied to accelerate the generation of macroscopic superposition states. The numerical calculation demonstrates that this approach allows us to generate a superposition of two classically distinct states of the spin ensemble with a high fidelity above 0.97 for 300 spins. For a larger spin ensemble, though the fidelity slightly declines, it maintains above 0.84 for an ensemble of 500 spins. The time to generate an MSS is also estimated, which shows that the significantly shortened generation time allows us to achieve such MSSs within a typical coherence time of the system.
Thermal state preparation is a central challenge in the simulation of quantum many-body systems. Yet, provably efficient algorithms for this task were only introduced recently [Chen et al. Nature 646, 561 (2025)]. These algorithms are based on dissipative Lindbladian evolution which exactly fixes the thermal state. Controlled and efficient digital simulation of this evolution, although possible in principle, remains out of reach for present-day quantum hardware. Subsequent work has therefore focused on analog approximations of the proposed Lindbladians via `collision models' with relatively modest requirements -- a resettable bath of ancilla qubits whose couplings to the system can be tuned in time-dependent fashion -- while still admitting rigorous fixed-point error bounds. Existing rigorous approaches, however, do not exploit the fact that these constructions generically implement not only the desired Lindblad dynamics, but also an additional unitary evolution generated by the system Hamiltonian which may aid convergence to the thermal state [Lloyd and Abanin arXiv:2506.21318 (2025)]. Here, we show that this unitary contribution does indeed tighten the fixed-point error bound and demonstrate that it is rigorously controlled by the system-bath coupling strength JJJ, scaling as J2J^2J2. This demonstrates that the effect of the spurious `Lamb shift' term generated by the system-bath interaction can be controlled by tuning JJJ. We clarify the role, previously observed, of a randomized implementation in suppressing possible resonances of the drive with the many-body spectrum, and bound the additional variance that this randomization imposes on observables. Finally, we numerically study aspects of the protocol which are relevant for its practical realization, such as the mixing time.