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.
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.
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).
Exploiting the rich phenomenology of periodically driven many-body systems is notoriously hindered by persistent heating in both the classical and the quantum realm. Here, we investigate to what extent coupling to a large thermal reservoir makes stabilization of a nontrivial steady state possible. To this end, we model both the system and the reservoir as classical spin chains where driving is applied through a rotating magnetic field, and we simulate the Hamiltonian dynamics of this setup. We find that the intuitive limits of infinite frequency and vanishing frequency, where the system dynamics is governed by the average and the instantaneous Hamiltonian, respectively, can be smoothly extended into entire regimes separated only by a small crossover region. At high frequencies, the driven system stroboscopically attains a Floquet-type Gibbs state at the reservoir temperature. At low frequencies, a global synchronized Gibbs state emerges, whose temperature may depart significantly from the initial temperature of the reservoir. Although our analysis in some parts relies on the specific properties of our setup, we argue that much of its phenomenology could be generic.
The dynamics of open quantum systems is commonly described by quantum master equations derived under the assumption of weak system-bath coupling and a separation of timescales between system and bath. When the system is additionally subjected to a periodic driving, the validity of the resulting Floquet master equations is further restricted to regimes of weak or high-frequency driving. Here, we benchmark a set of commonly used Floquet master equations for a model of two locally driven spins coupled to a shared Ohmic reservoir at finite temperature. We systematically probe the accuracy of the equations as a function of the driving parameters, thus identifying limits of their applicability. Dynamical maps predicted by each master equation are compared against numerically exact non-Markovian simulations, tracking the full relaxation dynamics. We find that the accuracy of each master equation closely reflects the assumptions underlying its derivation. For the Floquet-Lindblad equation, errors can be strongly amplified near resonances where the secular approximation breaks down, while approaches that avoid the secular approximation perform better and exhibit a more systematic dependence of the error on driving frequency and amplitude.
Exploiting the rich phenomenology of periodically-driven many-body systems is notoriously hindered by persistent heating in both the classical and quantum realm. Here, we investigate to what extent coupling to a large thermal reservoir makes stabilisation of a non-trivial steady state possible. To this end, we model both the system and the reservoir as classical spin chains where driving is applied through a rotating magnetic field, and simulate the Hamiltonian dynamics of this setup. We find that the intuitive limits of infinite and vanishing frequency, where the system dynamics is governed by the average and the instantaneous Hamiltonian, respectively, can be smoothly extended into entire regimes separated only by a small crossover region. At high frequencies, the driven system stroboscopically attains a Floquet-type Gibbs state at the reservoir temperature. At low frequencies, a synchronised Gibbs state emerges, whose temperature may depart significantly from that of the reservoir. Although our analysis in some parts relies on the specific properties our setup, we argue that much of its phenomenology should be generic for a large class of systems.
We introduce a functional renormalization group framework formulated directly in the Floquet steady state that systematically incorporates frequency-dependent interaction effects. By retaining the frequency structure of the two-particle vertex up to second order in interaction strength, our approach provides controlled access to dynamical response functions and nonequilibrium transport in driven, interacting systems. Using the periodically driven single-impurity Anderson model as a paradigmatic example, we benchmark our results against state-of-the-art Floquet Green's function methods and find quantitative agreement for finite-frequency observables up to intermediate interaction strengths. Remarkably, we also show that static properties are often captured reliably by much simpler approximations, suggesting practical pathways for modeling driven quantum materials. Finally, we demonstrate that although periodic driving of the dot strongly broadens the Kondo resonance through inelastic scattering, it leaves the many-body Kondo cloud largely intact. This robustness suppresses Floquet replicas of the Kondo peak and leads to a partial persistence of Kondo pinning, highlighting the resilience of emergent many-body correlations under local periodic driving.
The description of interacting quantum impurity models in steady-state nonequilibrium is an open challenge for computational many-particle methods: the numerical requirement of using a finite number of lead levels and the physical requirement of describing a truly open quantum system are seemingly incompatible. One possibility to bridge this gap is the use of Lindblad-driven discretized leads (LDDL): one couples auxiliary continuous reservoirs to the discretized lead levels and represents these additional reservoirs by Lindblad terms in the Liouville equation. For quadratic models governed by Lindbladian dynamics, we present an elementary approach for obtaining correlation functions analytically. In a second part, we use this approach to explicitly discuss the conditions under which the continuum limit of the LDDL approach recovers the correct representation of thermal reservoirs. As an analytically solvable example, the nonequilibrium resonant level model is studied in greater detail. Lastly, we present ideas towards a numerical evaluation of the suggested Lindblad equation for interacting impurities based on matrix product states. In particular, we present a reformulation of the Lindblad equation, which has the useful property that the leads can be mapped onto a chain where both the Hamiltonian dynamics and the Lindblad driving are local at the same time. Moreover, we discuss the possibility to combine the Lindblad approach with a logarithmic discretization needed for the exploration of exponentially small energy scales.