The study of the physical properties of open quantum systems is at the heart of many investigations, which aim to describe their dynamical evolution on theoretical ground and through physical realizations. Here, we develop a presentation of different aspects, which characterize these systems and confront different physical situations that can be realized leading to systems, which experience Markovian, non-Markovian, divisible or non-divisible interactions with the environments to which they are dynamically coupled. We aim to show how different approaches describe the evolution of quantum systems subject to different types of interactions with their environments. Quanta 2021; 10: 42–54.
Open quantum systems interact with their environment and their dynamical behaviour depends strongly both on the spectral properties of the environment and the structure of the interaction between the physical system and the environment. We examine the consequences of these spectral and structural properties on simple but general systems in the case of deterministic (non stochastic) interactions of arbitrary strength. The central point of interest concerns the role played by the semi-group property of the interaction in its relation with entropy and area laws properties of the system of interest.
Introduction As discussed in Chapter 1, to understand the general evolution, conditioned and unconditioned, of a quantum system, it is necessary to consider coupling it to a second quantum system. In the case in which the second system is much larger than the first, it is often referred to as a bath, reservoir or environment , and the first system is called an open system . The study of open quantum systems is important to quantum measurement for two reasons. First, all real systems are open to some extent, and the larger a system is, the more important its coupling to its environment will be. For a macroscopic system, such coupling leads to very rapid decoherence . Roughly, this term means the irreversible loss of quantum coherence, that is the conversion of a quantum superposition into a classical mixture. This process is central to understanding the emergence of classical behaviour and ameliorating, if not solving, the so-called quantum measurement problem . The second reason why open quantum systems are important is in the context of generalized quantum measurement theory as introduced in Chapter 1. Recall from there that, by coupling a quantum system to an ‘apparatus’ (a second quantum system) and then measuring the apparatus, a generalized measurement on the system is realized. For an open quantum system, the coupling to the environment is typically continuous (present at all times).
In this chapter we study some properties of systems of coupled quadratic quantum Hamiltonians. The well known example is coupled harmonic oscillators appearing in the Quantum Brownian Motion. An open system is a physical (S) interacting with the environment (E) such that the total system
(S∪E) is isolated from the rest of the universe. So we have two independent Hamiltonians
H^S,
H^E and an interaction
V^ between (S) and (E). The main problem discussed for open systems is to understand the dynamical action of the interaction
V^ with the environment on the time dependent evolution of (S) which is now irreversible because a part of its energy escapes to the environment. An important physical effect of the interaction of the environment on a quantum system is decoherence which give an explanation for the mechanism driving the quantum-to-classical transition. We restrict ourself to few mathematical problems related with this very active field of research in physics [155, 200, 231, 270]. In a first part we study the purity of a state of (S) (or the linear entropy) in a short time approximation. In a second part we discuss the separability of bipartite systems. In a third part we establish a master equation (or a Fokker-Planck type equation) for the time evolution of the reduced matrix density for coupled quadratic Hamiltonians by a bilinear inter-action. We give an explicit formula for the solution of this master equation so that the time evolution of the reduced density at time t is written as a convolution integral for the reduced density at initial time
t0=0, with a Gaussian kernel, for
0≤t<tc where
tc∈]0,∞] is a critical time such that reversibility is lost for
t>tc if
tc<+∞. Some manifestations of decoherence, for
t>0 small enough, are proved on our simple model which is similar to a representation of the Schrödinger cat.
Quantum systems usually suffer from unavoidable interactions with the environment. In most experiments, it is virtually impossible to isolate the system under study from the environment. It is thus imperative to study and understand how quantum systems interact with their surroundings. In the present study, I consider the evolution of quantum entanglement in a two-qubit system interacting with an environment in a regime where the non-Markovian effects are important. The present thesis is organized as follows: Chapter one is a general introduction to the thesis. In chapter two, some preliminary concepts that will be used in the subsequent chapters will be introduced and defined. These concepts include qubits, density matrix, Quantum entanglement and Entropic measures in quantum information. Ways to detect or quantify entanglement in a quantum system will also be discussed in the section on quantum entanglement. Chapter three will be about open quantum systems in general: concepts like master equations, Markovian quantum systems and non-Markovian quantum systems will be briefly reviewed. Chapter four will deal with time dependent entanglement features of two-qubit and multi-qubit systems interacting with an environment, basically all the results obtained in my study will be presented there. Some general conclusions will be drawn in chapter five. Copyright