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arXiv:2112.03955 · Physical review. D/Physical review. D.

Complexity for an open quantum system

Arpan Bhattacharyya, T. Hanif, S. Shajidul Haque, Md. Khaledur Rahman

Published Feb 16, 2022• 21 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

We study the complexity for an open quantum system. Our system is a harmonic oscillator coupled to a one-dimensional massless scalar field, which acts as the bath. Specifically, we consider the reduced density matrix by tracing out the bath degrees of freedom for both regular and inverted oscillators and compute the complexity of purification (COP) and complexity by using the operator-state mapping. We find that when the oscillator is regular, the COP saturates quickly for both underdamped and overdamped oscillators. Interestingly, when the oscillator is underdamped, we discover a kink-like behavior for the saturation value of the COP with a varying damping coefficient. For the inverted oscillator, we find a linear growth of the COP with time for all values of the bath-system interaction. However, when the interaction is increased the slope of the linear growth decreases, implying that the unstable nature of the system can be regulated by the bath.

DOI
10.1103/physrevd.105.046011

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We study the complexity for an open quantum system. Our system is a harmonic oscillator coupled to a one-dimensional massless scalar field, which acts as the bath. Specifically, we consider the reduced density matrix by tracing out the bath degrees of freedom for both regular and inverted oscillators and compute the complexity of purification (COP) and complexity by using the operator-state mapping. We find that when the oscillator is regular, the COP saturates quickly for both underdamped and overdamped oscillators. Interestingly, when the oscillator is underdamped, we discover a kink-like behavior for the saturation value of the COP with a varying damping coefficient. For the inverted oscillator, we find a linear growth of the COP with time for all values of the bath-system interaction. However, when the interaction is increased the slope of the linear growth decreases, implying that the unstable nature of the system can be regulated by the bath.
In this paper, we compare the saturation timescales for complexity, linear entropy, and entanglement negativity for two open quantum systems. Our first model is a coupled harmonic oscillator, where we treat one of the oscillators as the bath. The second one is a type of Caldeira-Leggett model, where we consider a one-dimensional free scalar field as the bath. Using these open quantum systems, we discovered that both the complexity of purification and the complexity from operator-state mapping is always saturated for a completely mixed state. More explicitly, the saturation timescale for both types of complexity is smaller than the saturation timescale for linear entropy. On top of this, we found that the saturation timescale for linear entropy and entanglement negativity is of the same order for the Caldeira-Leggett model.
A bstract We purify the thermal density matrix of a free harmonic oscillator as a two-mode squeezed state, characterized by a squeezing parameter and squeezing angle. While the squeezing parameter is fixed by the temperature and frequency of the oscillator, the squeezing angle is otherwise undetermined, so that the complexity of purification is obtained by minimizing the complexity of the squeezed state over the squeezing angle. The resulting complexity of purification of the thermal state is minimized at non-zero values of the squeezing angle and saturates to an order one number at low frequencies, indicating that there is no additional operator cost required to build thermal mixed states when the oscillator probes length scales that are large compared to the thermal length scale. We also review applications in which thermal density matrices arise for quantum fields on curved spacetimes, including Hawking radiation and a simple model of decoherence of cosmological density perturbations in the early Universe. The complexity of purification for these mixed states also saturates as a function of the effective temperature, which may have interesting consequences for the quantum information stored in these systems.
Krylov complexity is a measure of operator complexity that exhibits universal behavior and bounds a large class of other measures. In this paper, we generalize Krylov complexity from a closed system to an open system coupled to a Markovian bath, where Lindbladian evolution replaces Hamiltonian evolution. We show that Krylov complexity in open systems can be mapped to a non-Hermitian tight-binding model in a half-infinite chain. We discuss the properties of the non-Hermitian terms and show that the strengths of the non-Hermitian terms increase linearly with the increase of the Krylov basis index nnn. Such a non-Hermitian tight-binding model can exhibit localized edge modes that determine the long-time behavior of Krylov complexity. Hence, the growth of Krylov complexity is suppressed by dissipation, and at long times, Krylov complexity saturates at a finite value much smaller than that of a closed system with the same Hamiltonian. Our conclusions are supported by numerical results on several models, such as the Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev model and the interacting fermion model. Our work provides insights for discussing complexity, chaos, and holography for open quantum systems.
Abstract We investigate circuit complexity to characterize chaos in multiparticle quantum systems. In the process, we take a stride to analyze open quantum systems by using complexity. We propose a new diagnostic of quantum chaos from complexity based on the reduced density matrix by exploring different types of quantum circuits. Through explicit calculations on a toy model of two coupled harmonic oscillators, where one or both of the oscillators are inverted, we demonstrate that the evolution of complexity is a possible diagnostic of chaos.
Abstract Using a recent proposal of circuit complexity in quantum field theories introduced by Jefferson and Myers, we compute the time evolution of the complexity following a smooth mass quench characterized by a time scale δt in a free scalar field theory. We show that the dynamics has two distinct phases, namely an early regime of approximately linear evolution followed by a saturation phase characterized by oscillations around a mean value. The behavior is similar to previous conjectures for the complexity growth in chaotic and holographic systems, although here we have found that the complexity may grow or decrease depending on whether the quench increases or decreases the mass, and also that the time scale for saturation of the complexity is of order δt (not parametrically larger).
We present the reduced operator approximation: a simple, physically transparent and computationally efficient method of modelling open quantum systems. It employs the Heisenberg picture of the quantum dynamics, which allows us to focus on the system degrees of freedom in a natural and easy way. We describe different variants of the method, low- and high-order in the system–bath interaction operators, defining them for either general quantum harmonic oscillator baths or specialising them for independent baths with Lorentzian spectral densities. Its wide applicability is demonstrated on the examples of systems coupled to different baths (with varying system–bath interaction strength and bath memory length), and compared with the exact pseudomode and the popular quantum state diffusion approach. The method captures the decoherence of the system interacting with the bath, while conserving the total energy. Our results suggest that quantum coherence effects persist in open quantum systems for much longer times than previously thought.