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arXiv:2305.08941 · Quantum

Potential renormalisation, Lamb shift and mean-force Gibbs state – to shift or not to shift?

Luis Alfonso Correa, Jonas Glatthard

Published Sep 30, 2025• 8 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

Often, the microscopic interaction mechanism of an open quantum system gives rise to a `counter term' which renormalises the system Hamiltonian. Such term compensates for the distortion of the system's potential due to the finite coupling to the environment. Even if the coupling is weak, the counter term is, in general, not negligible. Similarly, weak-coupling master equations feature a number of `Lamb-shift terms' which, contrary to popular belief, cannot be neglected. Yet, the practice of vanishing both counter term and Lamb shift when dealing with master equations is almost universal; and, surprisingly, it can yield better results. By accepting the conventional wisdom, one may approximate the dynamics more accurately and, importantly, the resulting master equation is guaranteed to equilibrate to the correct steady state in the high-temperature limit. In this paper we discuss why is this the case. Specifically, we show that, if the potential distortion is small – but non-negligible – the counter term does not influence any dissipative processes to second order in the coupling. Furthermore, we show that, for large environmental cutoff, the Lamb-shift terms approximately cancel any coherent effects due to the counter term – this renders the combination of both contributions irrelevant in practice. We thus provide precise conditions under which the open-system folklore regarding Lamb shift and counter terms is rigorously justified.

DOI
10.22331/q-2025-09-30-1868

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Often, the microscopic interaction mechanism of an open quantum system gives rise to a counter term' which renormalises the system Hamiltonian. Such term compensates for the distortion of the system's potential due to the finite coupling to the environment. Even if the coupling is weak, the counter term is, in general, not negligible. Similarly, weak-coupling master equations feature a number of Lamb-shift terms' which, contrary to popular belief, cannot be neglected. Yet, the practice of vanishing both counter term and Lamb shift when dealing with master equations is almost universal; and, surprisingly, it can yield better results. By accepting the conventional wisdom, one may approximate the dynamics more accurately and, importantly, the resulting master equation is guaranteed to equilibrate to the correct steady state in the high-temperature limit. In this paper we discuss why is this the case. Specifically, we show that, if the potential distortion is small – but non-negligible – the counter term does not influence any dissipative processes to second order in the coupling. Furthermore, we show that, for large environmental cutoff, the Lamb-shift terms approximately cancel any coherent effects due to the counter term – this renders the combination of both contributions irrelevant in practice. We thus provide precise conditions under which the open-system folklore regarding Lamb shift and counter terms is rigorously justified.
We investigate the topic of renormalization in the theory of weakly interacting open quantum systems. Our starting point is an open quantum system interacting with a single heat bath. For a given setup, we discuss that the stationary state of the Davies-GKSL equation is thermodynamically inconsistent with the presence of the Lamb-Stark shift term. For this reason, we postulate the self-consistency condition for the dynamical equations. The condition fixes the renormalization procedure and recovers the thermodynamical consistency. In this way, we rederive the cumulant equation to illustrate how the self-consistency condition enters the derivation of the dynamical equations. The physical interpretation of the renormalization procedure is discussed in terms of the Born approximation. Furthermore, we compare the Lamb-Stark shift term (dynamical correction) with the second-order (static) correction to the so-called mean-force (Gibbs state) Hamiltonian. The discrepancy between the static and the dynamical correction questions the physical meaning of the latter one. Finally, we formulate a simplified renormalization scheme that can be directly applied to Davies-GKSL or Bloch-Redfield equations.
Considering two non-interacting qubits in the context of open quantum systems, it is well known that their common environment may act as an entangling agent. In a perturbative regime the influence of the environment on the system dynamics can effectively be described by a unitary and a dissipative contribution. For the two-spin Boson model with (sub-) Ohmic spectral density considered here, the particular unitary contribution (Lamb shift) easily explains the buildup of entanglement between the two qubits. Furthermore it has been argued that in the adiabatic limit, adding the so-called counterterm to the microscopic model compensates the unitary influence of the environment and, thus, inhibits the generation of entanglement. Investigating this assertion is one of the main objectives of the work presented here. Using the hierarchy of pure states (HOPS) method to numerically calculate the exact reduced dynamics, we find and explain that the degree of inhibition crucially depends on the parameter s determining the low frequency power law behavior of the spectral density J(ω)∼ωse−ω/ωc . Remarkably, we find that for resonant qubits, even in the adiabatic regime (arbitrarily large ωc ), the entanglement dynamics is still influenced by an environmentally induced Hamiltonian interaction. Further, we study the model in detail and present the exact entanglement dynamics for a wide range of coupling strengths, distinguish between resonant and detuned qubits, as well as Ohmic and deep sub-Ohmic environments. Notably, we find that in all cases the asymptotic entanglement does not vanish and conjecture a linear relation between the coupling strength and the asymptotic entanglement measured by means of concurrence. Further we discuss the suitability of various perturbative master equations for obtaining approximate entanglement dynamics.
The Hamiltonian of mean force is a widely used concept to describe the modification of the usual canonical Gibbs state for a quantum system whose coupling strength with the thermal bath is non-negligible. Here, we perturbatively derive general approximate expressions for the Hamiltonians of mean force in the weak-coupling approximation and in the high-temperature one. We numerically analyze the accuracy of the corresponding expressions and show that the precision of the Bloch–Redfield equantum master equation can be improved if we replace the original system Hamiltonian by the Hamiltonian of mean force.
In the long-time limit, an open quantum system coupled to a dissipative environment is believed to lose its coherence without driving or measurement. Counterintuitively, we provide a necessary condition on trapping the coherence of a two-level system entirely with a thermal bath. Based on a time-local master equation, it is found that the residue coherence survives even under a high-temperature bath as long as the long-time Lamb shift is exactly negative to the system transition frequency. This condition is generally met in the strong and even ultrastrong coupling regime that could be relaxed by increasing the environmental temperature. The counter-rotating interactions between system and bath is indispensable to the residue coherence, whose magnitude is affected by the system initial state and the bath structure.
The dynamical convergence of a system to the thermal distribution, or Gibbs state, is a standard assumption across all of the physical sciences. The Gibbs state is determined just by temperature and energies of the system. However, at decreasing system sizes, i.e., for nanoscale and quantum systems, the interaction with their environments is not negligible. The question then arises: Is the system's steady state still the Gibbs state? If not, how may the steady state depend on the interaction details? Here, we provide an overview of recent progress on answering these questions. We expand on the state of the art along two general avenues: First, we take the static point-of-view, which postulates the so-called mean force Gibbs state. This view is commonly adopted in the field of strong coupling thermodynamics, where modified laws of thermodynamics and nonequilibrium fluctuation relations are established on the basis of this modified state. Second, we take the dynamical point of view, originating from the field of open quantum systems, which examines the time-asymptotic steady state within two paradigms. We describe the mathematical paradigm, which proves return to equilibrium, i.e., convergence to the mean force Gibbs state, and then discuss a number of microscopic physical methods, particularly master equations. We conclude with a summary of established links between statics and equilibration dynamics and provide an extensive list of open problems. This comprehensive overview will be of interest to researchers in the wider fields of quantum thermodynamics, open quantum systems, mesoscopic physics, statistical physics, and quantum optics and will find applications whenever energy is exchanged on the nanoscale, from quantum chemistry and biology to magnetism and nanoscale heat management.
We present a systematic thermodynamic analysis of nonsecular GKLS master equations. When some energy transitions in the system are comparable with the dissipative rate, the secular approximation is not valid, and the positivity of the dynamics must be ensured via other approximations. The dynamics then presents features reminiscent from strong coupling to the environment: e.g. the equilibrium state with an environment at thermal equilibrium is not a Gibbs state of the local system Hamiltonian and the dynamics couples energy coherences and populations. Nonetheless, we build a unified, consistent thermodynamic framework for those dynamics. We focus on two approximations beyond the full secular approximation (the local and the more accurate geometric-arithmetic approximations), and then employ systematic perturbation theory on microscopic expressions for the first and second law of thermodynamics which relate irreversibility to the increase of system-environment correlations. We show that, in spite of the weak system-bath coupling, the system-bath interaction energy participates to the energy balance, and is directly linked to the Lamb-shift Hamiltonian. We compare this microscopic entropy production with the definition based on the contractivity of the reduced system dynamics (Spohn inequality). We show that, unlike for secular master equations, the two entropy production rates differ because of the presence of non-vanishing stationary coherences in the energy eigenbasis. However, in the case of a single thermal bath, the difference is purely transient, and no work can be cyclically extracted from the steady-state despite its non-Gibbs form. Finally, we illustrate our results with simple examples, clarifying and completing the thermodynamic picture of Markovian dynamics in the quantum regime.