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arXiv:1711.02699 · Physical review. B./Physical review. B

Thermalization in open quantum systems

Israel Reichental, Anat Klempner, Yariv Kafri, Daniel K. Podolsky

Published Apr 2, 2018• 35 citations
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Abstract

We study thermalization in open quantum systems using the Lindblad formalism. A method that both thermalizes and couples to Lindblad operators only at edges of the system is introduced. Our method leads to a Gibbs state of the system, satisfies fluctuation-dissipation relations, and applies both to integrable and nonintegrable systems. Possible applications of the method include the study of systems coupled locally to multiple reservoirs. Our analysis highlights the limits of applicability of the Lindblad approach to study strongly driven systems.

DOI
10.1103/physrevb.97.134301

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We investigate the relaxation dynamics of open nonintegrable quantum many-body systems in the thermodynamic limit by using a tensor-network formalism. We simulate the Lindblad quantum master equation (LQME) of infinite systems by making use of the uniform matrix product operators (MPO) as the ansatz of their density matrices. Furthermore, we establish a method to measure the thermodynamic equivalence between two states described by the uniform MPOs. We numerically show that when an initial state of the LQME is a thermal Gibbs state, a time evolved state is always indistinguishable from a Gibbs state with a time-dependent effective temperature in the weak-dissipation and thermodynamic limit.
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