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arXiv:1207.7174 · Physical Review E

Noncanonical statistics of a spin-boson model: Theory and exact Monte Carlo simulations

Chee‐Kong Lee, Jianshu Cao, Jiangbin Gong

Published Aug 10, 2012• 57 citations
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Abstract

Equilibrium canonical distribution in statistical mechanics assumes weak system-bath coupling (SBC). In real physical situations this assumption can be invalid, and equilibrium quantum statistics of the system may be noncanonical. By exploiting both polaron transformation and perturbation theory in a spin-boson model, an analytical treatment is advocated to study noncanonical statistics of a two-level system at arbitrary temperature and for arbitrary SBC strength, yielding theoretical results in agreement with exact Monte Carlo simulations. In particular, the eigen-representation of system's reduced density matrix is used to quantify noncanonical statistics as well as the quantumness of the open system. For example, it is found that irrespective of SBC strength, noncanonical statistics enhances as temperature decreases but vanishes at high temperature.

DOI
10.1103/physreve.86.021109

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Equilibrium canonical distribution in statistical mechanics assumes weak system-bath coupling (SBC). In real physical situations this assumption can be invalid, and equilibrium quantum statistics of the system may be noncanonical. By exploiting both polaron transformation and perturbation theory in a spin-boson model, an analytical treatment is advocated to study noncanonical statistics of a two-level system at arbitrary temperature and for arbitrary SBC strength, yielding theoretical results in agreement with exact Monte Carlo simulations. In particular, the eigen-representation of system's reduced density matrix is used to quantify noncanonical statistics as well as the quantumness of the open system. For example, it is found that irrespective of SBC strength, noncanonical statistics enhances as temperature decreases but vanishes at high temperature.
The canonical statistics describes the statistical properties of an open system by assuming its coupling with the heat bath is infinitesimal in comparison with the total energy in thermodynamic limit. In this paper, we generally derive a noncanonical density matrix for the open system with a finite coupling to the heat bath, which deforms the energy shell to effectively modify the conventional canonical way. The obtained noncanonical distribution reflects the back action of system on the bath and thus depicts the statistical correlations between two subsystems by the mutual information as a result of energy conservation.
Equilibrium probes have been widely used in various schemes of sensing to quantum reservoirs. Many previous studies assumed that the probe-reservoir coupling is sufficiently weak such that the equilibrium state of the probe is approximately described by a canonical Gibbs state at the same temperature of the reservoir. Such a weak-coupling approximation severely restricts the range of application for an equilibrium-probe-based quantum sensing scenario. Going beyond the weak-coupling limitation, we here investigate the noncanonical effect, which is naturally induced by strong couplings, on the performance of a quantum sensing scheme. In this scheme, a quantum two-level system is used as the probe to estimate the parameters of a dissipative bosonic reservoir, by employing the polaron transformation approach. It is found that, compared with that of the canonical-equilibrium-state case, the noncanonical effect can effectively boost the sensing precision at both zero and finite temperatures. Paving the way toward realizing high-precision quantum sensing in practice, our result reveals the positive role of noncanonicality in the studies of quantum technologies.
The effectiveness of the variational approach \`a la Feynman is proved in the spin-boson model, i.e., the simplest realization of the Caldeira-Leggett model able to reveal the quantum phase transition from delocalized to localized states and the quantum dissipation and decoherence effects induced by a heat bath. After exactly eliminating the bath degrees of freedom, we propose a trial, nonlocal in time, interaction between the spin and itself simulating the coupling of the two-level system with the bosonic bath. It stems from a Hamiltonian where the spin is linearly coupled to a finite number of harmonic oscillators whose frequencies and coupling strengths are variationally determined. We show that a very limited number of these fictitious modes is enough to get a remarkable agreement, up to very low temperatures, with the data obtained by using an approximation-free Monte Carlo approach, predicting (1) in the Ohmic regime, a Berezinski-Thouless-Kosterlitz quantum phase transition exhibiting the typical universal jump at the critical value; and (2) in the sub-Ohmic regime ($s\ensuremath{\le}0.5$), mean-field quantum phase transitions, with logarithmic corrections for s=0.5s=0.5s=0.5.
The non-Markovian dynamics of the driven spin-boson model at zero and finite temperature is investigated theoretically. Based on a unitary transformation and convolution theorem, the analytical expression of population difference in Laplace space is obtained. This method provides a tool to help us to understand the interference between driving and dissipation within the non-Markovian frame. We study the transient and the steady-state non-Markovian dynamics of population difference P ( t ) in the case of different temperature, driving and spin–bath coupling (SBC) strength. It has been shown that it is necessary to use non-Markovian methods when SBC is strong. At zero temperature, the curve of steady-state amplitude P lt versus Rabi driving amplitude Ω is N-like shaped. While at finite temperature, the curve becomes Λ-like shaped. These curves come from the interference between driving and dissipation. Also, from the interference pattern above, we know that large coherent oscillations can be obtained by optimizing the parameters: Rabi driving amplitude, temperature and SBC strength.
Quantum thermodynamic quantities, normally formulated with the assumption of weak system-bath coupling (SBC), can often be contested in physical circumstances with strong SBC. This work presents an alternative treatment that enables us to use standard concepts based on weak SBC to tackle with quantum thermodynamics with strong SBC. Specifically, via a physics-motivated mapping between strong and weak SBC, we show that it is possible to identify thermodynamic quantities with arbitrary SBC, including work and heat that shed light on the first law of thermodynamics with strong SBC. Quantum fluctuation theorems, such as the Tasaki-Crooks relation and the Jarzynski equality are also shown to be extendable to strong SBC cases. Our theoretical results are further illustrated with a working example.
We consider multiple noninteracting quantum mechanical two-level systems coupled to a common bosonic bath and study its quantum phase transition with Monte Carlo simulations using a continuous imaginary time cluster algorithm. The common bath induces an effective ferromagnetic interaction between the otherwise independent two-level systems, which can be quantified by an effective interaction strength. For degenerate energy levels above a critical value of the bath coupling strength $\ensuremath{\alpha}$ all two-level systems freeze into the same state and the critical value ${\ensuremath{\alpha}}_{c}$ decreases asymptotically as 1/N1/N1/N with increasing NNN. For a finite number NNN of two-level systems the quantum phase transition (at zero temperature) is in the same universality class as the single spin-boson model; in the limit $N\ensuremath{\rightarrow}\ensuremath{\infty}$ the system shows mean-field critical behavior independent of the power of the spectral function of the bosonic bath. We also study the influence of a spatial separation of the spins in a bath of bosonic modes with linear dispersion relation on the location and characteristics of the phase transition as well as on correlations between the two-level systems.