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arXiv:1810.03011 · New Journal of Physics

Speed limit for open quantum systems

Ken Funo, Naoto Shiraishi, Keiji Saito

Published Dec 19, 2018• 133 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

We study the quantum speed limit for open quantum systems described by the Lindblad master equation. The obtained inequality shows a trade-off relation between the operation time and the physical quantities such as the energy fluctuation and the entropy production. We further identify a quantity characterizing the speed of the state transformation, which appears only when we consider the open system dynamics in the quantum regime. When the thermal relaxation is dominant compared to the unitary dynamics of the system, we show that this quantity is approximated by the energy fluctuation of the counter-diabatic Hamiltonian which is used as a control field in the shortcuts to adiabaticity protocol. We discuss the physical meaning of the obtained quantum speed limit and try to give better intuition about the speed in open quantum systems.

DOI
10.1088/1367-2630/aaf9f5

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We study the quantum speed limit for open quantum systems described by the Lindblad master equation. The obtained inequality shows a trade-off relation between the operation time and the physical quantities such as the energy fluctuation and the entropy production. We further identify a quantity characterizing the speed of the state transformation, which appears only when we consider the open system dynamics in the quantum regime. When the thermal relaxation is dominant compared to the unitary dynamics of the system, we show that this quantity is approximated by the energy fluctuation of the counter-diabatic Hamiltonian which is used as a control field in the shortcuts to adiabaticity protocol. We discuss the physical meaning of the obtained quantum speed limit and try to give better intuition about the speed in open quantum systems.
In the context of quantum speed limits, it has been shown that the minimum time required to cause a desired state conversion via the open quantum dynamics can be estimated using the entropy production. However, the established entropy-based bounds tend to be loose, making it difficult to accurately estimate the minimum time for evolution. In this research, we have combined the knowledge of the entropy-based speed limits with that of the resource theory of asymmetry (RTA) and provided much stricter inequalities. Our results show that the limitation on the change rate of states and expectation values can be divided into two parts: quantum coherence for energy (i.e., asymmetry) contributed by the system and the heat bath and the classical entropy-increasing effect from the bath. As a result, our inequalities demonstrate that the difference in the speed of evolution between classical and quantum open systems, i.e., the quantum enhancement in speed, is determined by the quantum Fisher information, which measures quantum fluctuations of energy and serves as a standard resource measure in the resource theory of asymmetry. We further show that a similar relation holds for the rate of change of expectation values of physical quantities.
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Quantum speed limit (QSL) for open quantum systems in the non-Markovian regime is analyzed. We provide the lower bound for the time required to transform an initial state to a final state in terms of thermodynamic quantities such as the energy fluctuation, entropy production rate and dynamical activity. Such bound was already analyzed for Markovian evolution satisfying detailed balance condition. Here we generalize this approach to deal with arbitrary evolution governed by time-local generator. Our analysis is illustrated by three paradigmatic examples of qubit evolution: amplitude damping, pure dephasing, and the eternally non-Markovian evolution.
Abstract We investigate the speed limit of the state transformation in open quantum systems described by the Lindblad type quantum master equation. We obtain universal bounds of the total entropy production described by the trace distance between the initial and final states in the interaction picture. Our bounds can be tighter than the bound of Vu and Hasegawa (2021 Phys. Rev. Lett. 126 010601) which measures the distance by the eigenvalues of the initial and final states: this distance is less than or equal to the trace distance. For this reason, our results can significantly improve Vu–Hasegawa’s bound. The trace distance in the Schrödinger picture is bounded by a sum of the trace distance in the interaction picture and the trace distance for unitary dynamics described by only the Hamiltonian in the quantum master equation.
We investigate the bound on the speed of state transformation in the quantum systems that are coupled to general environments.We focus on the energy fluctuation of the target system and the coupling to the environment, and clarify the universal constraint on the state transformation deriving the general speed-limit inequality.This speed-limit inequality is applicable to any open systems including physical situations that have not been studied so far.We apply the inequality to the thermalization phenomena in isolated quantum systems, and the quantum cyclic engines.For the thermalization, we provide several inequalities to estimate the equilibration time.In the cyclic heat engines, we derive a rigorous constraint on the state change in the cycle where the Planck constant plays a fundamental role.
Existing quantum speed limits for controlled open quantum systems depend on the specified trajectory. For example, lower bounds on quantum annealing times in the presence of dissipation depend explicitly on the chosen annealing schedule. Recently, schedule-independent speed limits have been derived for annealing in the closed quantum system setting (SciPost Phys. 18, 159 (2025)). In this work, we generalize these results to open quantum systems, deriving schedule-independent lower bounds for quantum annealing times in systems described by a Lindblad master equation. We analyze the interplay between coherent control and dissipation in single- and two-qubit examples, demonstrating that the derived lower bounds capture key scaling behavior with respect to the strength of the dissipator. Finally, we apply the bound to thermal state preparation and show that the bound matches the expected asymptotic behavior for an Ising model in the high temperature limit.