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arXiv:1806.02738 · Physical Review A

Magnus expansion for a chirped quantum two-level system

P. Nalbach, Vicente Leyton‐Ortega

Published Aug 28, 2018• 10 citations
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Abstract

We derive a Magnus expansion for a frequency chirped quantum two-level system. We obtain a time-independent effective Hamiltonian which generates a stroboscopic time evolution. At lowest order the according dynamics is identical to results from using a rotating wave approximation. We determine, furthermore, also the next higher-order corrections within our expansion scheme in correspondence to the Bloch-Siegert shifts for harmonically driven systems. Importantly, our scheme can be extended to more complicated systems, i.e., even many-body systems.

DOI
10.1103/physreva.98.023855

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We derive a Magnus expansion for a frequency chirped quantum two-level system. We obtain a time-independent effective Hamiltonian which generates a stroboscopic time evolution. At lowest order the according dynamics is identical to results from using a rotating wave approximation. We determine, furthermore, also the next higher-order corrections within our expansion scheme in correspondence to the Bloch-Siegert shifts for harmonically driven systems. Importantly, our scheme can be extended to more complicated systems, i.e., even many-body systems.
The Floquet-Magnus expansion is a widely used tool to derive effective descriptions of time-periodic quantum systems by approximating their dynamics with a time-independent Hamiltonian. However, its standard formulation is, strictly speaking, restricted to bounded Hamiltonians. In this work, we extend its definition and analysis to a broad class of time-periodic unbounded Hamiltonians. Our approach is based on an a priori distinct nonperturbative framework for the construction of effective Hamiltonians, which we show to reproduce the Floquet-Magnus expansion. A particular strength of our framework is that it allows us to prove that the resulting effective dynamics approximates the original time evolution propagators to arbitrary order in the high-frequency limit without requiring convergence of the Floquet-Magnus expansion, a condition that is already highly restrictive even in the bounded setting. We illustrate the scope of the method on representative models: the quantum Rabi Hamiltonian in the interaction picture, and the periodically driven quantum harmonic oscillator.
We present a general, nonperturbative method for deriving effective Hamiltonians of arbitrary order for periodically driven systems based on an iterated integration-by-parts technique. The resulting family of effective Hamiltonians reproduces the well-known Floquet-Magnus expansion, now enhanced with explicit error bounds that quantify the distance between the exact and approximate dynamics at each order, even in cases where the Floquet-Magnus series fails to converge. We apply the method to the semiclassical Rabi model and provide explicit error bounds for both the Bloch-Siegert Hamiltonian and its third-order refinement. Our analysis shows that, while the rotating-wave approximation more accurately captures the true dynamics than the Bloch-Siegert Hamiltonian in most regimes, the third-order approximation ultimately outperforms both.
For a linearly driven quantum two-level system, or qubit, sets of stroboscropic points along the cycloidal-like trajectory in the rotating frame can be approximated using the exact rotating wave approximation introduced in arXiv:1807.02858. That work introduces an effective Hamiltonian series Heff\mathcal H_{\text{eff}}Heff​ generating smoothed qubit trajectories; this series has been obtained using a combination of a Magnus expansion and a Taylor series, a Magnus-Taylor expansion. Since, however, this Hamiltonian series is not guaranteed to converge for arbitrary pulse shapes, the same work hypothesizes an axiomatic definition of the effective Hamiltonian. The first two of the proposed axioms define Heff\mathcal H_{\text{eff}}Heff​ to (i) be analytic and (ii) generate a stroboscopic time evolution. In this work we probe a third axiom---motivated by the smoothed trajectories mentioned above---namely, (iii) a variational principle stating that the integral of the Hamiltonian's positive eigenvalue taken over the full pulse duration is minimized by this Heff\mathcal H_{\text{eff}}Heff​. We numerically refute the validity of this third axiom via a variational minimization of the said integral.
Comprehending the dynamical behaviour of quantum systems driven by time-varying Hamiltonians is particularly difficult. Systems with as little as two energy levels are not yet fully understood. Since the inception of Magnus’ expansion in 1954, no fundamentally novel mathematical method for solving the quantum equations of motion with a time-varying Hamiltonian has been devised. We report here of an entirely different non-perturbative approach, termed path-sum, which is always guaranteed to converge, yields the exact analytical solution in a finite number of steps for finite systems and is invariant under scale transformations. We solve for the dynamics of all two-level systems as well as of many-body Hamiltonians with a particular emphasis on NMR applications (Bloch-Siegert effect and N-spin systems involving the dipolar Hamiltonian and spin diffusion).
We investigate the Magnus expansion for a generic time-dependent two-level system under single-axis driving.By virtue of the su(2) Lie algebra, the expansion is decomposed into a commutator-free form. To illustrate the usefulness of the gained expression, we then revisit the Landau-Zener-Stückelberg-Majorana model, with a focus on non-adiabatic transitions as well as the Stokes phase. In addition, the semiclassical Rabi model is systematically treated by determining the Floquet quasienergy up to different orders. We demonstrate how to employ suitable picture transformations as well as on how to enforce the symmetry of the underlying model in order to guarantee convergence of the expansion as well as to achieve satisfactory agreement with the exact results. For both models that we studied it turns out that a third order approximation yields results that are in next to perfect agreement with exact analytical ones. Surprisingly, in the case of the semiclassical Rabi model, even the second order Magnus approximation in the adiabatic picture produces almost exact results for a large parameter range.