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arXiv:2211.15722 · Physical Review A

Analytical evaluation of the coefficients of the Hu-Paz-Zhang master equation: Ohmic spectral density, zero temperature, and consistency check

Gábor Homa, József Zsolt Bernád, András Csordás

Published Jul 20, 2023• 9 citations
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Abstract

We investigate the exact master equation of Hu, Paz, and Zhang for a quantum harmonic oscillator at zero temperature with a Lorentz-Drude type Ohmic spectral density. This master equation plays an important role in the study of quantum Brownian motion and in various applications. In this paper, we give an analytical evaluation of the coefficients of this non-Markovian master equation without Lindblad form, which allows us to investigate consistencies of the solutions, the positivity of the stationary density operator, and the boundaries of the model's parameters.

DOI
10.1103/physreva.108.012210

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We investigate the exact master equation of Hu, Paz, and Zhang for a quantum harmonic oscillator at zero temperature with a Lorentz-Drude type Ohmic spectral density. This master equation plays an important role in the study of quantum Brownian motion and in various applications. In this paper, we give an analytical evaluation of the coefficients of this non-Markovian master equation without Lindblad form, which allows us to investigate consistencies of the solutions, the positivity of the stationary density operator, and the boundaries of the model's parameters.
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Abstract We present an exact analytical solution of the Hu–Paz–Zhang master equation in a precise Markovian limit for a system of two harmonically coupled harmonic oscillators interacting with a common thermal bath of harmonic oscillators. The thermal bath is initially considered to be at arbitrary temperatures and characterized by an Ohmic Lorentz–Drude spectral density. In the examined system, couplings between the two harmonic oscillators and the environment ensure a complete decoupling of the center-of-mass and relative degrees of freedom, resulting in undamped dynamics in the relative coordinate. The exact time evolution is used to analyze the system’s entanglement dynamics, quantified through logarithmic negativity and quantum mutual information, while ensuring the positivity of the density operator to confirm the physical validity of the results. We demonstrate that, under certain parameter regimes and initial conditions, the asymptotic dynamics can give rise to periodic entanglement-disentanglement behavior. Furthermore, numerical simulations reveal that for negative values of the direct coupling between the oscillators, which are sufficiently close to a critical lower bound beyond which the system becomes unstable, the system can maintain entanglement across a broad temperature range and for arbitrarily long durations.
Open quantum system theory is fundamental for a proper description of quantum systems in different contexts such as chemistry, condensed matter physics, bio-physics and opto-mechamics. Quantum brownian motion which is analytically described by the Hu-Paz-Zhang (HPZ) model represents one of the most important examples of an open quantum system. In this paper we propose a novel derivation of its master equation, based on the Heisenberg picture. We provide an exact and analytic equation both for the operators as well as for the states. The result, equivalent to the one derived originally by HPZ, is expressed in terms of the spectral density, regardless the strength of the coupling between the system and the environment and allows to compute the time evolution of physically relevant quantities in a much easier way, since it is directly expressed in terms of the spectral density. An example is explicitly studied.
We revisit the model of a system made up of a Brownian quantum oscillator linearly coupled to an environment made up of many quantum oscillators at finite temperature. We show that the HPZ master equation for the reduced density matrix derived earlier [B.L. Hu, J.P. Paz, Y. Zhang, Phys. Rev. D 45, 2843 (1992)] has incorrectly specified coefficients for the case of nonlocal dissipation. We rederive the QBM master equation, correctly specifying all coefficients, and determine the position uncertainty to be free of excessive cutoff sensitivity. Our coefficients and solutions are reduced entirely to contour integration for analytic spectra at arbitrary temperature, coupling strength, and cut-off. As an illustration we calculate the master equation coefficients and solve the master equation for ohmic coupling (with finite cutoff) and example supra-ohmic and sub-ohmic spectral densities. We determine the effect of an external force on the quantum oscillator and also show that our representation of the master equation and solutions naturally extends to a system of multiple oscillators bilinearly coupled to themselves and the bath in arbitrary fashion. This produces a formula for investigating the standard quantum limit which is central to addressing many theoretical issues in macroscopic quantum phenomena and experimental concerns related to low temperature precision measurements. We find that in a dissipative environment, all initial states settle down to a Gaussian density matrix whose covariance is determined by the thermal reservoir and whose mean is determined by the external force. We specify the thermal covariance for the spectral densities we explore.
We revisit the model of a quantum Brownian oscillator linearly coupled to an environment of quantum oscillators at finite temperature. By introducing a compact and particularly well-suited formulation, we give a rather quick and direct derivation of the master equation and its solutions for general spectral functions and arbitrary temperatures. The flexibility of our approach allows for an immediate generalization to cases with an external force and with an arbitrary number of Brownian oscillators. More importantly, we point out an important mathematical subtlety concerning boundary-value problems for integro-differential equations which led to incorrect master equation coefficients and impacts on the description of nonlocal dissipation effects in all earlier derivations. Furthermore, we provide explicit, exact analytical results for the master equation coefficients and its solutions in a wide variety of cases, including ohmic, sub-ohmic and supra-ohmic environments with a finite cut-off.
We derive the Hu-Paz-Zhang master equation for a Brownian particle linearly coupled to a bath of harmonic oscillators on the plane with spatial noncommutativity. The results obtained are exact to all orders in the noncommutative parameter. As a by-product we derive some miscellaneous results such as the equilibrium Wigner distribution for the reservoir of noncommutative oscillators, the weak coupling limit of the master equation and a set of sufficient conditions for strict purity decrease of the Brownian particle. Finally, we consider a high-temperature Ohmic model and obtain an estimate for the time scale of the transition from noncommutative to ordinary quantum mechanics. This scale is considerably smaller than the decoherence scale.