Quantum transport simulations are rapidly evolving and now encompass well-controlled tensor network techniques for many-body limits. One powerful approach combines matrix product states with extended reservoirs. In this method, continuous reservoirs are represented by explicit, discretized counterparts and a chemical potential or temperature drop is maintained by external relaxation. Currents are strongly influenced by relaxation when it is very weak or strong, resulting in a simulation analog of Kramers turnover for solution-phase chemical reactions. At intermediate relaxation, the intrinsic conductance, that given by the Landauer or Meir-Wingreen expressions, moderates the current. We demonstrate that strong impurity scattering (i.e., a small steady-state current) reveals anomalous transport regimes within this methodology at weak-to-moderate and moderate-to-strong relaxation. The former is due to virtual transitions and the latter to unphysical broadening of the populated density of states. Thus, the turnover analog has five standard transport regimes, further constraining the parameters that lead to recovery of the intrinsic conductance. In the worst case, the common strategy of choosing a relaxation strength proportional to the reservoir level spacing can prevent convergence to the continuum limit. This advocates a simulation strategy where one utilizes the current versus relaxation turnover profiles to identify simulation parameters that most efficiently reproduce the intrinsic physical behavior.
Quantum transport simulations are rapidly evolving and now encompass well-controlled tensor network techniques for many-body limits. One powerful approach combines matrix product states with extended reservoirs. In this method, continuous reservoirs are represented by explicit, discretized counterparts and a chemical potential or temperature drop is maintained by external relaxation. Currents are strongly influenced by relaxation when it is very weak or strong, resulting in a simulation analog of Kramers turnover for solution-phase chemical reactions. At intermediate relaxation, the intrinsic conductance, that given by the Landauer or Meir-Wingreen expressions, moderates the current. We demonstrate that strong impurity scattering (i.e., a small steady-state current) reveals anomalous transport regimes within this methodology at weak-to-moderate and moderate-to-strong relaxation. The former is due to virtual transitions and the latter to unphysical broadening of the populated density of states. Thus, the turnover analog has five standard transport regimes, further constraining the parameters that lead to recovery of the intrinsic conductance. In the worst case, the common strategy of choosing a relaxation strength proportional to the reservoir level spacing can prevent convergence to the continuum limit. This advocates a simulation strategy where one utilizes the current versus relaxation turnover profiles to identify simulation parameters that most efficiently reproduce the intrinsic physical behavior.
Quantum transport simulations often use explicit, yet finite, electronic reservoirs. These should converge to the correct continuum limit, albeit with a trade-off between discretization and computational cost. Here, we study this interplay for extended reservoir simulations, where relaxation maintains a bias or temperature drop across the system. Our analysis begins in the non-interacting limit, where we parameterize different discretizations to compare them on an even footing. For many-body systems, we develop a method to estimate the relaxation that best approximates the continuum by controlling virtual transitions in Kramers turnover for the current. While some discretizations are more efficient for calculating currents, there is little benefit with regard to the overall state of the system. Any gains become marginal for many-body, tensor network simulations, where the relative performance of discretizations varies when sweeping other numerical controls. These results indicate that typical reservoir discretizations have little impact on numerical costs for certain computational tools. The choice of a relaxation parameter is nonetheless crucial, and the method we develop provides a reliable estimate of the optimal relaxation for finite reservoirs.
Open-system simulations of quantum transport provide a platform for the study of true steady states, Floquet states, and the role of temperature, time dynamics, and fluctuations, among other physical processes. They are rapidly gaining traction, especially techniques that revolve around "extended reservoirs," a collection of a finite number of degrees of freedom with relaxation that maintains a bias or temperature gradient, and have appeared under various guises (e.g., the extended or mesoscopic reservoir, auxiliary master equation, and driven Liouville-von Neumann approaches). Yet, there are still a number of open questions regarding the behavior and convergence of these techniques. Here, we derive general analytical solutions, and associated asymptotic analyses, for the steady-state current driven by finite reservoirs with proportional coupling to the system/junction. In doing so, we present a simplified and unified derivation of the non-interacting and many-body steady-state currents through arbitrary junctions, including outside of proportional coupling. We conjecture that the analytic solution for proportional coupling is the most general of its form for isomodal relaxation (i.e., relaxing proportional coupling will remove the ability to find compact, general analytical expressions for finite reservoirs). These results should be of broad utility in diagnosing the behavior and implementation of extended reservoir and related approaches, including the convergence to the Landauer limit (for non-interacting systems) and the Meir-Wingreen formula (for many-body systems).
Extended reservoirs provide a framework for capturing macroscopic, continuum environments, such as metallic electrodes driving a current through a nanoscale contact, impurity, or material. We examine the application of this approach to periodically driven systems, specifically in the context of quantum transport. As with nonequilibrium steady states in time-independent scenarios, the current displays a Kramers' turnover including the formation of a plateau region that captures the physical, continuum limit response. We demonstrate that a simple stability criteria identifies an appropriate relaxation rate to target this physical plateau. Using this approach, we study quantum transport through a periodically driven tilted lattice coupled to two metallic reservoirs held at a finite bias and temperature. We use this model to benchmark the extended reservoir approach and assess the stability criteria. The approach recovers well-understood physical behavior in the limit of weak system-reservoir coupling. Extended reservoirs enable addressing strong coupling and nonlinear response as well, where we analyze how transport responds to the dynamics inside the driven lattice. These results set the foundations for the use of extended reservoir approach for periodically driven, quantum systems, such as many-body Floquet states.
The simulation of open many-body quantum systems is challenging, requiring methods to both handle exponentially large Hilbert spaces and represent the influence of (infinite) particle and energy reservoirs. These two requirements are at odds with each other: larger collections of modes can increase the fidelity of the reservoir representation but come at a substantial computational cost when included in numerical many-body techniques. An increasingly utilized and natural approach to control the growth of the reservoir is to cast a finite set of reservoir modes themselves as an open quantum system. There are, though, many routes to do so. Here, we introduce an accumulative reservoir construction---an ARC---that employs a series of partial refreshes of the extended reservoirs. Through this series, the representation accumulates the character of an infinite reservoir. This provides a unified framework for both continuous (Lindblad) relaxation and a recently introduced periodically refresh approach (i.e., discrete resets of the reservoir modes to equilibrium). In the context of quantum transport, we show that the phase space for physical behavior separates into discrete and continuous relaxation regimes with the boundary between them set by natural, physical timescales. Both of these regimes ``turnover'' into regions of over- and underdamped coherence in a way reminiscent of Kramers' crossover. We examine how the range of behavior impacts errors and the computational cost, including within tensor networks. These results provide the first comparison of distinct extended reservoir approaches, showing that they have different scaling of error versus cost (with a bridging ARC regime decaying fastest). Exploiting the enhanced scaling, though, will be challenging, as it comes with a substantial increase in (operator space) entanglement entropy.
Under non-equilibrium conditions, energy/particle currents flow through a quantum system coupled to multiple baths. Although the fluxes increase in the weak coupling regime as the coupling strengthens, the reason why they decrease to zero for large coupling remains unknown. This counterintuitive behavior of energy exchange or transport phenomena is called the turnover effect. It has been predicted in several quantum systems such as photosynthetic complexes, mesoscopic junctions, quantum heat machines, and chemical networks without a single counterexample, and it results in constrained performance due to limited currents. Here, we use scattering theory to study the turnover effect produced by low-zdensity reservoirs of free particles scattered by a quantum system through localized potentials. We find that the turnover effect is a consequence of total reflection that impedes the reservoir particle from reaching the interaction region and exchanging energy with the quantum system. Moreover, we design a protocol based on quantum tunneling to avoid the turnover and to increase the maximum current. This strategy could be used to unleash the full potential of devices based on temperature/chemical potential gradients.
Tensor networks are a powerful tool for many-body ground states with limited entanglement. These methods can nonetheless fail for certain time-dependent processes-such as quantum transport or quenches-where entanglement growth is linear in time. Matrix-product-state decompositions of the resulting out-of-equilibrium states require a bond dimension that grows exponentially, imposing a hard limit on simulation timescales. However, in the case of transport, if the reservoir modes of a closed system are arranged according to their scattering structure, the entanglement growth can be made logarithmic. Here, we apply this ansatz to open systems via extended reservoirs that have explicit relaxation. This enables transport calculations that can access steady states, time dynamics and noise, and periodic driving (e.g., Floquet states). We demonstrate the approach by calculating the transport characteristics of an open, interacting system. These results open a path to scalable and numerically systematic many-body transport calculations with tensor networks.