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arXiv:1305.6891

Quantum Friction: Cooling Quantum Systems with Unitary Time Evolution

Aurel Bulgac, Michael McNeil Forbes, Kenneth J. Roche, Gabriel Wlazłowski

Published May 29, 2013• 5 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

We introduce a type of quantum dissipation -- local quantum friction -- by adding to the Hamiltonian a local potential that breaks time-reversal invariance so as to cool the system. Unlike the Kossakowski-Lindblad master equation, local quantum friction directly effects unitary evolution of the wavefunctions rather than the density matrix: it may thus be used to cool fermionic many-body systems with thousands of wavefunctions that must remain orthogonal. In addition to providing an efficient way to simulate quantum dissipation and non-equilibrium dynamics, local quantum friction coupled with adiabatic state preparation significantly speeds up many-body simulations, making the solution of the time-dependent Schrödinger equation significantly simpler than the solution of its stationary counterpart.

DOI
10.48550/arxiv.1305.6891

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We introduce a type of quantum dissipation -- local quantum friction -- by adding to the Hamiltonian a local potential that breaks time-reversal invariance so as to cool the system. Unlike the Kossakowski-Lindblad master equation, local quantum friction directly effects unitary evolution of the wavefunctions rather than the density matrix: it may thus be used to cool fermionic many-body systems with thousands of wavefunctions that must remain orthogonal. In addition to providing an efficient way to simulate quantum dissipation and non-equilibrium dynamics, local quantum friction coupled with adiabatic state preparation significantly speeds up many-body simulations, making the solution of the time-dependent Schrödinger equation significantly simpler than the solution of its stationary counterpart.
Dissipative forces are ubiquitous and thus constitute an essential part of realistic physical theories. However, quantization of dissipation has remained an open challenge for nearly a century. We construct a quantum counterpart of classical friction, a velocity-dependent force acting against the direction of motion. In particular, a translationary invariant Lindblad equation is derived satisfying the appropriate dynamical relations for the coordinate and momentum (i.e., the Ehrenfest equations). Numerical simulations establish that the model approximately equilibrates. These findings significantly advance a long search for a universally valid Lindblad model of quantum friction and open opportunities for exploring novel dissipation phenomena.
We study the effects of dissipative boundaries in many-body systems at continuous quantum transitions, when the parameters of the Hamiltonian driving the unitary dynamics are close to their critical values. As paradigmatic models we consider fermionic wires subject to dissipative interactions at the boundaries, associated with pumping or loss of particles. They are induced by couplings with a Markovian baths, so that the evolution of the system density matrix can be described by a Lindblad master equation. We study the quantum evolution arising from variations of the Hamiltonian and dissipation parameters, starting at t=0t=0t=0 from the ground state of the Hamiltonian at, or close to, the critical point. Two different dynamic regimes emerge: (i) an early-time regime for times $t\ensuremath{\sim}L$, where the competition between coherent and incoherent drivings develops a dynamic finite-size scaling, obtained by extending the scaling framework describing the coherent critical dynamics of the closed system, to allow for the boundary dissipation; and (ii) a large-time regime for $t\ensuremath{\sim}{L}^{3}$ whose dynamic scaling describes the late quantum evolution leading to the $t\ensuremath{\rightarrow}\ensuremath{\infty}$ stationary states.
We introduce and study the adiabatic dynamics of free-fermion models subject to a local Lindblad bath and in the presence of a time-dependent Hamiltonian. The merit of these models is that they can be solved exactly, and will help us to study the interplay between nonadiabatic transitions and dissipation in many-body quantum systems. After the adiabatic evolution, we evaluate the excess energy (the average value of the Hamiltonian) as a measure of the deviation from reaching the final target ground state. We compute the excess energy in a variety of different situations, where the nature of the bath and the Hamiltonian is modified. We find robust evidence of the fact that an optimal working time for the quantum annealing protocol emerges as a result of the competition between the nonadiabatic effects and the dissipative processes. We compare these results with the matrix-product-operator simulations of an Ising system and show that the phenomenology we found also applies for this more realistic case.
Previous years researchers began to simulate open quantum system, taking into account the interaction between system and the environment. One approach to deal with this problem is to use the density matrix within the Liouville-von-Neumann formalism or the Markovian variant the Lindblad equations. Another way is to use a stochastic approach where a random force is added to the system. The benefit of the stochastic approach is to solve the dynamics of the system with less time and memory than the density matrix approaches. In this project we want to develop a stochastic approach that can deal with the stochastic wave functions approach. We did this on a 2-level system and found that it works well when comparing to a density matrix approach. Next, we tested a quantum particle connect to a bath of harmonic oscillators using the stochastic approach. We found that a friction term is necessary and applied it. Like in the classical Langevin equations the friction constant and the random force fluctuations are related by the fluctuation-dissipation constant. We showed that with friction the dynamics decays to an ensemble with energy of Egs+kBTE_{gs}+k_BTEgs​+kB​T. However, we also found here are problems. The system seems to absorb energy indefinitely if the temperature is higher than the zero point energy or if the system is a Morse oscillator. Thus more research is required to make this method work.
In a former publication [D. Schuch and M. Moshinsky, Phys. Rev. A 73, 062111 (2006)] we have shown that the time evolution of a quantum system with at most quadratic Hamiltonian that can be described by different methods, namely, the time-dependent Schrödinger equation, the time propagator or Feynman kernel, and the Wigner function is connected via a dynamical invariant, the so-called Ermakov invariant. Since exact invariants of this type also exist for certain effective descriptions of dissipative quantum systems, we will show the relations between these descriptions and the corresponding invariants and will discuss how the results obtained for the conservative systems must be modified in the presence of a linear velocity dependent frictional force.
We present a quantum algorithm to simulate general finite dimensional Lindblad master equations without the requirement of engineering the system-environment interactions. The proposed method is able to simulate both Markovian and non-Markovian quantum dynamics. It consists in the quantum computation of the dissipative corrections to the unitary evolution of the system of interest, via the reconstruction of the response functions associated with the Lindblad operators. Our approach is equally applicable to dynamics generated by effectively non-Hermitian Hamiltonians. We confirm the quality of our method providing specific error bounds that quantify its accuracy.