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arXiv:1407.6530 · Physical Review B

Phonon dynamics in correlated quantum systems driven away from equilibrium

Eli Y. Wilner, Haobin Wang, Michael Thoss, Eran Rabani

Published Sep 25, 2014• 25 citations
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Abstract

A general form of a many-body Hamiltonian is considered, which includes an interacting fermionic subsystem coupled to noninteracting extended fermionic and bosonic systems. We show that the exact dynamics of the extended bosonic system can be derived from the reduced density matrix of the subsystem alone, despite the fact that the latter contains information about the subsystem only. The advantage of the formalism is immediately clear: While the reduced density matrix of the subsystem is readily available, the formalism offers access to observables contained in the full density matrix, which is often difficult to obtain. As an example, we consider an extended Holstein model and study the nonequilibrium dynamics of the so-called ``reaction mode'' for different model parameters. The effects of the phonon frequency, the strength of the electron-phonon couplings, and the source-drain bias voltage on the phonon dynamics across the bistability are discussed.

DOI
10.1103/physrevb.90.115145

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A general form of a many-body Hamiltonian is considered, which includes an interacting fermionic subsystem coupled to noninteracting extended fermionic and bosonic systems. We show that the exact dynamics of the extended bosonic system can be derived from the reduced density matrix of the subsystem alone, despite the fact that the latter contains information about the subsystem only. The advantage of the formalism is immediately clear: While the reduced density matrix of the subsystem is readily available, the formalism offers access to observables contained in the full density matrix, which is often difficult to obtain. As an example, we consider an extended Holstein model and study the nonequilibrium dynamics of the so-called ``reaction mode'' for different model parameters. The effects of the phonon frequency, the strength of the electron-phonon couplings, and the source-drain bias voltage on the phonon dynamics across the bistability are discussed.
Schwinger Keldysh field theory is a widely used paradigm to study nonequilibrium dynamics of quantum many-body systems starting from a thermal state. We extend this formalism to describe nonequilibrium dynamics of quantum systems starting from arbitrary initial many-body density matrices. We show how this can be done for both bosons and fermions, and for both closed and open quantum systems, using additional sources coupled to bilinears of the fields at the initial time, calculating Green's functions in a theory with these sources, and then taking appropriate set of derivatives of these Green's functions with respect to initial sources to obtain physical observables. The set of derivatives depends on the initial density matrix. The physical correlators in a dynamics with arbitrary initial conditions do not satisfy Wick's theorem, even for noninteracting systems. However, our formalism constructs intermediate ``$n\ensuremath{-}\mathrm{particle}$ Green's functions'' that obey Wick's theorem and provide a prescription to obtain physical correlation functions from them. This allows us to obtain analytic answers for all physical many-body correlation functions of a noninteracting system even when it is initialized to an arbitrary density matrix. We use these exact expressions to obtain an estimate of the violation of Wick's theorem and relate it to presence of connected multiparticle initial correlations in the system. We illustrate this new formalism by calculating density and current profiles in many-body fermionic and bosonic open quantum systems initialized to nontrivial density matrices. We have also shown how this formalism can be extended to interacting many-body systems.
The reduced dynamics formalism has recently emerged as a powerful tool to study the dynamics of non-equilibrium quantum impurity models in strongly correlated regimes. Examples include the non-equilibrium Anderson impurity model near the Kondo crossover temperature and the non-equilibrium Holstein model, for which the formalism provides an accurate description of the reduced density matrix of the system for a wide range of timescales. In this work, we generalize the formalism to allow for non-system observables such as the current between the impurity and leads. We show that the equation of motion for the reduced observable of interest can be closed with the equation of motion for the reduced density matrix and demonstrate the new formalism for a generic resonant level model.
We address the question whether observables of an exactly solvable model of electrons coupled to (optical) phonons relax into large time stationary state values and investigate if the asymptotic expectation values can be computed using a stationary density matrix. Two initial nonequilibrium situations are considered. A sudden quench of the electron-phonon coupling, starting from the noninteracting canonical equilibrium at temperature TTT in the electron as well as in the phonon subsystems, leads to a rather simple dynamics. A richer time evolution emerges if the initial state is taken as the product of the phonon vacuum and the filled Fermi sea supplemented by a highly excited additional electron. Our model has a natural set of constants of motion, with as many elements as degrees of freedom. In accordance with earlier studies of such type of models, we find that expectation values which become stationary can be described by the density matrix of a generalized Gibbs ensemble which differs from that of a canonical ensemble. For the model at hand, it appears to be evident that the eigenmode occupancy operators should be used in the construction of the stationary density matrix.
The theoretical description of materials' properties driven out of equilibrium has important consequences in various fields such as semiconductor spintronics, nonlinear optics, and continuous and discrete quantum information science and technology. The coupling of a quantum many-body system to an external bath can dramatically modify its dynamics compared to that of closed systems; new phenomena like relaxation and decoherence appear as a consequence of the non-unitary evolution of the quantum system. In addition, electron-electron correlations must be properly accounted for in order to go beyond a simple one-electron or mean-field description of the electronic system. Here, we discuss a first-principles methodology based on the evolution of the electronic density matrix capable of treating electron-environment interactions and electron-electron correlations at the same level of description. The effect of the environment is separated into a coherent contribution, like the coupling to applied external electromagnetic fields, and an incoherent contribution, like the interaction with lattice vibrations or the thermal background of radiation. Electron-electron interactions are included using the nonequilibrium Green's function plus the generalized Kadanoff-Baym ansatz. The obtained non-Markovian coupled set of equations reduces to the ordinary Lindblad quantum master equation form in the Markovian limit.
We describe the extension of the density matrix embedding theory framework to coupled interacting fermion-boson systems. This provides a frequency-independent, entanglement embedding formalism to treat bulk fermion-boson problems. We illustrate the concepts within the context of the one-dimensional Hubbard-Holstein model, where the phonon bath states are obtained from the Schmidt decomposition of a self-consistently adjusted coherent state. We benchmark our results against accurate density matrix renormalization group calculations.
We present an application of the extended stochastic Liouville equation [G. M. G. McCaul et al., Phys. Rev. B 95, 125124 (2017)], which gives an exact solution for the reduced density matrix of an open system surrounded by a harmonic heat bath. This method considers the extended system (the open system and the bath) being thermally equilibrated prior to the action of a time-dependent perturbation, as opposed to the usual assumption that the system and the bath are initially partitioned. Our method presents an exact technique capable of accounting for arbitrary parameter regimes of the model. Here, we present our first numerical implementation of the method in the simplest case of a Caldeira-Leggett representation of the bath Hamiltonian, and apply it to a spin-boson system driven from coupled equilibrium. We observe significant behaviors in both the transient dynamics and asymptotic states of the reduced density matrix not present in the usual approximation.