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arXiv:1909.02023 · Physical Review Research

Engineered thermalization and cooling of quantum many-body systems

Mekena Metcalf, Jonathan E. Moussa, Wibe A. de Jong, Mohan Sarovar

Published May 22, 2020• 38 citations
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Abstract

The authors propose a thermalization scheme based on driven, dissipative auxiliary modes that emulate the action of a macroscopic bath over relevant timescales. This can be used to generate thermal states for quantum simulations protocols.
DOI
10.1103/physrevresearch.2.023214

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We develop a scheme for engineering genuine thermal states in analog quantum simulation platforms by coupling local degrees of freedom to driven, dissipative ancilla pseudospins. We demonstrate the scheme in a many-body quantum spin lattice simulation setting. A Born-Markov master equation describing the dynamics of the many-body system is developed, and we show that if the ancilla energies are periodically modulated, with a carefully chosen hierarchy of timescales, one can effectively thermalize the many-body system. Through analysis of the time-dependent dynamical generator, we determine the conditions under which the true thermal state is an approximate dynamical fixed point for general system Hamiltonians. Finally, we evaluate the thermalization protocol through numerical simulation and discuss prospects for implementation on current quantum simulation hardware.
We investigate and compare two particle number-conserving protocols for the preparation of a topologically nontrivial state. The first is derived from thermally coupling the system to a cold bath, while the second is based on engineered dissipation. We numerically study the time required to reach the target state as well as its robustness against physically important perturbations. Crucially, in both protocols, the cooling capability is limited by dissipatively induced diffusion processes. The resulting quadratic scaling of the cooling time with system size is also corroborated analytically using mean-field approximations and a purely classical random-walk model. Furthermore, we find that the engineered protocol admits a unique and stable dark state, which contributes to an ongoing discussion regarding the applicability of dissipative state preparation to many-body systems.