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arXiv:1903.00190 · Physical Review Letters

Discontinuities in Driven Spin-Boson Systems due to Coherent Destruction of Tunneling: Breakdown of the Floquet-Gibbs Distribution

Georg Engelhardt, Gloria Platero, Jianshu Cao

Published Sep 20, 2019• 33 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

If an open quantum system is periodically driven with high frequency and the driving commutes with the system-bath coupling operator, it is known that the system approaches a Floquet-Gibbs state, a generalization of Gibbs states to periodically driven systems. Here, we investigate the stationary state of an ac-driven system when the driving and dissipation are noncommutative. Then, the resulting stationary state does not obey the Floquet-Gibbs distribution, and the system dynamics is determined by inelastic scattering processes of the driving field. Based on the Floquet-Redfield formalism, we show that the probability distribution can exhibit population inversion and discontinuities, i.e., jumps, for parameters at which coherent destruction of tunneling takes place. These discontinuities can be observed as intensity jumps in the emission into the bath.

DOI
10.1103/physrevlett.123.120602

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If an open quantum system is periodically driven with high frequency and the driving commutes with the system-bath coupling operator, it is known that the system approaches a Floquet-Gibbs state, a generalization of Gibbs states to periodically driven systems. Here, we investigate the stationary state of an ac-driven system when the driving and dissipation are noncommutative. Then, the resulting stationary state does not obey the Floquet-Gibbs distribution, and the system dynamics is determined by inelastic scattering processes of the driving field. Based on the Floquet-Redfield formalism, we show that the probability distribution can exhibit population inversion and discontinuities, i.e., jumps, for parameters at which coherent destruction of tunneling takes place. These discontinuities can be observed as intensity jumps in the emission into the bath.
Time-periodic quantum systems are present all over science and technology. They have been successfully studied using Floquet theory, and a broad diversity of interesting phenomena such as coherent destruction of tunnelling, dynamical localization and creation of new phases of matter have been discovered. Furthermore, periodic driving has also been introduced as a tool for engineering novel quantum systems that have no static analogue. Besides these remarkable achievements for isolated systems, in reality, systems always interact with their surroundings. Taking the effect of the environment into account, time-periodic quantum systems have been mainly described using the Floquet-Markov approach, which consists in deriving a weak coupling master equation in the Floquet basis. In this thesis, we focus on how to overcome these standard approximations in the description of driven open quantum systems. We start by providing a general review on the topics of isolated driven systems, open quantum systems and the Floquet-Markov approach, before presenting the main results of this work. Under the effect of high-frequency driving, we provide an analytic solution to a large class of open quantum systems. Our method relies on discrete symmetries of the system-bath Hamiltonian and grants access to the time evolution operator of the full system, including bath degrees of freedom. The solution can be interpreted as the stroboscopic evolution of a family of observables under the influence of an effective static Hamiltonian. This provides a flexible simulation procedure of nontrivial Hamiltonians. The results are exemplified with the driven spin-boson model, where a coherent control of dissipation is observed. By a novel combination of Floquet theory, full counting statistics and a Markovian embedding strategy (reaction coordinate mapping), more intricate scenarios with additional driven system-environment interactions are addressed. Hereby, we can access the dynamics and thermodynamics of a periodically driven thermal machine. For the particular case where the working medium is a two-level system, we identify four different operating regimes, including a heat engine and a refrigerator. As the coupling strength is increased, their efficiency and coefficient of performance decrease and the refrigerator regime disappears. Notably, our model reproduces the setup of laser cooling of trapped ions in a specific parameter limit. Following the same combination of methods, we investigate electron pumping through a single quantum dot with periodically modulated energy and tunnelling amplitudes. In the high-frequency regime, the direction of the current can be controlled with the driving phase and a rectification effect that is exclusive to the non-Markovian character of the model is observed. In the low-frequency regime, we apply an additional transformation to view the model as three independent transport channels and observe that the coupling strength also controls the current direction. Studying charge fluctuations we validate that our model behaves as a single-electron source.
We investigate the steady-state energy flow of the periodically driven nonequilibrium spin-boson model by means of combining counter-rotating-hybridized rotating-wave (CHRW) method with full counting statistics. In the case of weak driving $(A<0.1\mathrm{\ensuremath{\Delta}})$, where AAA is the driving amplitude and $\mathrm{\ensuremath{\Delta}}$ is the energy gap of the two-level system, our results are consistent with those obtained by traditional rotating-wave approximation (RWA) approach; in the case of high-frequency driving, our results are in agreement with the ones of the secular Floquet-Redfield method. As the driving amplitude increases, the steady-state flow exhibits nonlinear behavior: it reaches a maximum at medium driving, and then decreases to zero, which means that the coherent destruction of tunneling (CDT) appears, and then continues to grow slowly. We also find that, when the steady-state energy flow varies with driving frequency ${\ensuremath{\omega}}_{d}$, comparing with RWA results, the counter-rotating (CR) terms increase the energy flow at low-frequency driving $({\ensuremath{\omega}}_{d}<\mathrm{\ensuremath{\Delta}})$, where ${\ensuremath{\omega}}_{d}$ is the driving frequency, and decreases it at high-frequency driving $({\ensuremath{\omega}}_{d}>\mathrm{\ensuremath{\Delta}})$. In the case of strong driving, when the zero-order Bessel function of the first kind satisfies ${J}_{0}(\frac{A}{{\ensuremath{\omega}}_{d}}\ensuremath{\zeta})=0$, instead of ${J}_{0}(\frac{A}{{\ensuremath{\omega}}_{d}})=0$, the steady-state energy flow is 0, which corresponds to the CDT of the energy flow. The modified parameter $\ensuremath{\zeta}$ mainly defines the contribution of the CR terms. At high-frequency driving, the modified parameter $\ensuremath{\zeta}$ tends to 1,1,1, our result is consistent with previous results ${J}_{0}(\frac{A}{{\ensuremath{\omega}}_{d}})=0$. We find that the CDT of flow only occurs when both CR terms of the driving and the dissipation are considered simultaneously. Our results show the influence of the CR terms on the energy flow and the modification of CDT condition and give theoretical guidance for energy transport of small quantum devices.
We study probability distribution of a steady state of a periodically driven system coupled to a thermal bath by using a quantum master equation in the weak-coupling limit. It is proved that, even when the external field is strong, the probability distribution is independent of the detailed nature of the thermal bath under the following conditions: (i) the Hamiltonian of the relevant system is bounded and the period of the driving field is short, (ii) the Hamiltonians for the driving field at different times commute, and (iii) the Hamiltonians of the driving field and of the interaction between the relevant system and the thermal bath commute. It is shown that the steady state is described by the Gibbs distribution of the Floquet states of the relevant system at the temperature of the thermal bath.
A periodically driven quantum system, when coupled to a thermal bath, relaxes to a non-equilibrium asymptotic state. To describe these states in the case of infinitesimal coupling, the notion of Floquet-Gibbs state was recently introduced. A Floquet-Gibbs state is characterized by a density matrix diagonal in the Floquet basis of the decoupled coherent system. The diagonal elements obey the Boltzmann distribution parametrized by the quasienergies of the Floquet states. It was pointed out that the Floquet-Gibbs states are realized under strict conditions that might be experimentally infeasible. Here, by using the Magnus expansion and the concept of effective Floquet Hamiltonian, we go beyond the conventionally used rotating-wave approximation and demonstrate that the condition of infinitesimal coupling can be lifted and the idea of Floquet-Gibbs states can be extended to a broader class of open quantum systems possessing finite dissipation.
We study the dissipative dynamics of a two-level system (TLS) exposed to strong ac driving. By combing Floquet theory with Van Vleck perturbation theory in the TLS tunneling matrix element, we diagonalize the time-dependent Hamiltonian and provide corrections to the renormalized Rabi frequency of the TLS, which are valid for both a biased and unbiased TLS and go beyond the known high-frequency and rotating-wave results. In order to mimic environmental influences on the TLS, we couple the system weakly to a thermal bath and solve analytically the corresponding Floquet-Bloch-Redfield master equation. We give a closed expression for the relaxation and dephasing rates of the TLS and discuss their behavior under variation of the driving amplitude. Further, we examine the robustness of coherent destruction of tunneling (CDT) and driving-induced tunneling oscillations (DITO). We show that also for a moderate driving frequency an almost complete suppression of tunneling can be achieved for short times and demonstrate the sensitiveness of DITO to a change of the external parameters.
We provide an analytic solution to the problem of system-bath dynamics under the effect of high-frequency driving that has applications in a large class of settings, such as driven-dissipative many-body systems. Our method relies on discrete symmetries of the system-bath Hamiltonian and provides the time evolution operator of the full system, including bath degrees of freedom, without weak-coupling or Markovian assumptions. An interpretation of the solution in terms of the stroboscopic evolution of a family of observables under the influence of an effective static Hamiltonian is proposed, which constitutes a flexible simulation procedure of nontrivial Hamiltonians. We instantiate the result with the study of the spin-boson model with time-dependent tunneling amplitude. We analyze the class of Hamiltonians that may be stroboscopically accessed for this example and illustrate the dynamics of system and bath degrees of freedom.