Challenges
Datasets
Workspaces
Papers
Discussions
Leaderboard
Log inSign up
Challenges
Datasets
Workspaces
Papers
Discussions
Leaderboard
Blog
Job Board
Q3AS

© 2026 Aqora Quantum S.A.S.

TermsPrivacyLegal Notice

arXiv:2408.16759 · APL Quantum

Variational approach to atom-membrane dynamics

Dennis P. Clougherty

Published Dec 1, 2024• 3 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

Using the Dirac–Frenkel variational principle, a time-dependent description of the dynamics of a two-level system coupled to a bosonic bath is formulated. The method is applied to the case of a gas of cold atoms adsorbing to an elastic membrane at a finite temperature via phonon creation. The time-dependence of the system state is analytically calculated using Laplace transform methods, and a closed-form expression for the transition rate is obtained. Atoms in the gas transition to the adsorbed state through a resonance that has contributions from a distribution of vibrational modes of the membrane. The resonance can decay with the creation of a phonon to complete the adsorption process. The adsorption rate at low membrane temperatures agrees with the golden rule estimate to the lowest order in the coupling constant for values greater than a critical coupling strength. Below this critical coupling strength, the adsorption rate is exponentially suppressed by a phonon reduction factor whose exponent diverges with increasing adsorbent size. The rate changes discontinuously with coupling strength for low temperature membranes, and the magnitude of the discontinuity decreases with increasing temperature. These variational results suggest the quantum adsorption model may contain a first-order quantum phase transition.

DOI
10.1063/5.0237141

Related papers

Infrared Problem in Cold Atom Quantum Physisorption on 2D Materials

Sanghita Sengupta, Dennis P. Clougherty

Results from four different approximations to the phonon-assisted quantum adsorption rate for cold atoms on a 2D material are compared and contrasted: (1) a loop expansion (LE) based on the atom-phonon coupling, (2) non-crossing approximation (NCA), (3) independent boson model approximation (IBMA), and (4) a leading-order soft-phonon resummation method (SPR). The SPR method treats the adsorbed atom as a surface polaron where the phonon cloud accompanying the bound atom is a phonon coherent state. We conclude that, of the four approximations considered, only the SPR method gives a divergence-free result in the large membrane regime at finite temperature. The other three methods give an adsorption rate that diverges in the limit of an infinite surface.

arXiv:1809.08990•Journal of Physics Conference Series•Dec 1, 2018•3 citations

Infrared problem in quantum acoustodynamics

Dennis P. Clougherty, Sanghita Sengupta

Quantum electrodynamics (QED) provides a highly accurate description of phenomena involving the interaction of atoms with light. We argue that the quantum theory describing the interaction of cold atoms with a vibrating membrane---quantum acoustodynamics (QAD)---shares many issues and features with QED. Specifically, the adsorption of an atom on a vibrating membrane can be viewed as the counterpart to QED radiative electron capture. A calculation of the adsorption rate to lowest order in the atom-phonon coupling is finite; however, higher-order contributions suffer from an infrared problem mimicking the case of radiative capture in QED. Terms in the perturbation series for the adsorption rate diverge as a result of massless particles in the model (flexural phonons of the membrane in QAD and photons in QED). We treat this infrared problem in QAD explicitly to obtain finite results by regularizing with a low-frequency cutoff that corresponds to the inverse size of the membrane. Using a coherent-state basis for the soft-phonon final state, we then sum the dominant contributions to derive a new formula for the multiphonon adsorption rate of atoms on the membrane that gives results that are finite, nonperturbative in the atom-phonon coupling, and consistent with the Kinoshita-Lee-Nauenberg theorem. For micromembranes, we predict a reduction with increasing membrane size for the low-energy adsorption rate. We discuss the relevance of this to the adsorption of a cold gas of atomic hydrogen on suspended graphene.

arXiv:1611.09445•Physical Review A•May 12, 2017•5 citations

Variational calculation of the dynamics of a two level system interacting with a bath

R. Silbey, Robert A. Harris

A variational calculation of the dynamics of a two level system interacting with a bath is presented. The effective tunneling matrix element is renormalized by the interaction with the bath. For the case of a bath with ohmic dissipation (or infrared divergence), the variational calculation gives a vanishing tunneling at T=0 for critical values of the coupling and gives a highly unusual temperature dependence for the tunneling rate for large kT, all of which agree with recent path integral calculations. The present method also yields results for intermediate temperatures and coupling. This indicates that a judicious choice of the zeroth order Hamiltonian to include the major part of the coupling can lead to correct results even in low order perturbation theory.

The Journal of Chemical Physics•Mar 15, 1984•469 citations

Dynamics of the sub-Ohmic spin-boson model: A time-dependent variational study

Ning Wu, Liwei Duan, Xin Li +1 more

The Dirac-Frenkel time-dependent variation is employed to probe the dynamics of the zero temperature sub-Ohmic spin-boson model with strong friction utilizing the Davydov D1 ansatz. It is shown that initial conditions of the phonon bath have considerable influence on the dynamics. Counterintuitively, even in the very strong coupling regime, quantum coherence features still manage to survive under the polarized bath initial condition, while such features are absent under the factorized bath initial condition. In addition, a coherent-incoherent transition is found at a critical coupling strength α ≈ 0.1 for s = 0.25 under the factorized bath initial condition. We quantify how faithfully our ansatz follows the Schrödinger equation, finding that the time-dependent variational approach is robust for strong dissipation and deep sub-Ohmic baths (s ≪ 1).

arXiv:1302.1682•The Journal of Chemical Physics•Feb 28, 2013•42 citations

Infrared dynamics of cold atoms on hot graphene membranes

Sanghita Sengupta, Valeri N. Kotov, Dennis P. Clougherty

We study the infrared dynamics of low-energy atoms interacting with a sample of suspended graphene at finite temperature. The dynamics exhibits severe infrared divergences order by order in perturbation theory as a result of the singular nature of low-energy flexural phonon emission. Our model can be viewed as a two-channel generalization of the independent boson model with asymmetric atom-phonon coupling. This allows us to take advantage of the exact nonperturbative solution of the independent boson model in the stronger channel while treating the weaker one perturbatively. In the low-energy limit, the exact solution can be viewed as a resummation (exponentiation) of the most divergent diagrams in the perturbative expansion. As a result of this procedure, we obtain the atom's Green function which we use to calculate the atom damping rate, a quantity equal to the quantum sticking rate. A characteristic feature of our results is that the Green's function retains a weak, infrared cutoff dependence that reflects the reduced dimensionality of the problem. As a consequence, we predict a measurable dependence of the sticking rate on graphene sample size. We provide detailed predictions for the sticking rate of atomic hydrogen as a function of temperature and sample size. The resummation yields an enhanced sticking rate relative to the conventional Fermi golden rule result (equivalent to the one-loop atom self-energy), as higher-order processes increase damping at finite temperature.

arXiv:1603.03476•Physical review. B./Physical review. B•Jun 21, 2016•7 citations

Temperature-controlled open-quantum-system dynamics using a time-dependent variational method

Mantas Jakučionis, Darius Abramavičius

The Dirac-Frenkel variational method with Davydov ${\text{D}}_{2}$ trial wavefunction is extended by introducing a thermalization algorithm and applied to simulate dynamics of a general open quantum system. The algorithm allows to control temperature variations of a harmonic finite-size bath when in contact with the quantum system. Thermalization of the bath vibrational modes is realized via stochastic scatterings, implemented as a discrete-time Bernoulli process with Poisson statistics. It controls bath temperature by steering vibrational modes' evolution towards their canonical thermal equilibrium. Numerical analysis of the exciton relaxation dynamics in a small molecular cluster reveals that thermalization additionally provides significant calculation speedup due to the reduced number of vibrational modes needed to obtain the convergence.

arXiv:2103.02586•Physical Review A•Mar 1, 2021•5 citations
Using the Dirac–Frenkel variational principle, a time-dependent description of the dynamics of a two-level system coupled to a bosonic bath is formulated. The method is applied to the case of a gas of cold atoms adsorbing to an elastic membrane at a finite temperature via phonon creation. The time-dependence of the system state is analytically calculated using Laplace transform methods, and a closed-form expression for the transition rate is obtained. Atoms in the gas transition to the adsorbed state through a resonance that has contributions from a distribution of vibrational modes of the membrane. The resonance can decay with the creation of a phonon to complete the adsorption process. The adsorption rate at low membrane temperatures agrees with the golden rule estimate to the lowest order in the coupling constant for values greater than a critical coupling strength. Below this critical coupling strength, the adsorption rate is exponentially suppressed by a phonon reduction factor whose exponent diverges with increasing adsorbent size. The rate changes discontinuously with coupling strength for low temperature membranes, and the magnitude of the discontinuity decreases with increasing temperature. These variational results suggest the quantum adsorption model may contain a first-order quantum phase transition.
Results from four different approximations to the phonon-assisted quantum adsorption rate for cold atoms on a 2D material are compared and contrasted: (1) a loop expansion (LE) based on the atom-phonon coupling, (2) non-crossing approximation (NCA), (3) independent boson model approximation (IBMA), and (4) a leading-order soft-phonon resummation method (SPR). The SPR method treats the adsorbed atom as a surface polaron where the phonon cloud accompanying the bound atom is a phonon coherent state. We conclude that, of the four approximations considered, only the SPR method gives a divergence-free result in the large membrane regime at finite temperature. The other three methods give an adsorption rate that diverges in the limit of an infinite surface.
Quantum electrodynamics (QED) provides a highly accurate description of phenomena involving the interaction of atoms with light. We argue that the quantum theory describing the interaction of cold atoms with a vibrating membrane---quantum acoustodynamics (QAD)---shares many issues and features with QED. Specifically, the adsorption of an atom on a vibrating membrane can be viewed as the counterpart to QED radiative electron capture. A calculation of the adsorption rate to lowest order in the atom-phonon coupling is finite; however, higher-order contributions suffer from an infrared problem mimicking the case of radiative capture in QED. Terms in the perturbation series for the adsorption rate diverge as a result of massless particles in the model (flexural phonons of the membrane in QAD and photons in QED). We treat this infrared problem in QAD explicitly to obtain finite results by regularizing with a low-frequency cutoff that corresponds to the inverse size of the membrane. Using a coherent-state basis for the soft-phonon final state, we then sum the dominant contributions to derive a new formula for the multiphonon adsorption rate of atoms on the membrane that gives results that are finite, nonperturbative in the atom-phonon coupling, and consistent with the Kinoshita-Lee-Nauenberg theorem. For micromembranes, we predict a reduction with increasing membrane size for the low-energy adsorption rate. We discuss the relevance of this to the adsorption of a cold gas of atomic hydrogen on suspended graphene.
A variational calculation of the dynamics of a two level system interacting with a bath is presented. The effective tunneling matrix element is renormalized by the interaction with the bath. For the case of a bath with ohmic dissipation (or infrared divergence), the variational calculation gives a vanishing tunneling at T=0 for critical values of the coupling and gives a highly unusual temperature dependence for the tunneling rate for large kT, all of which agree with recent path integral calculations. The present method also yields results for intermediate temperatures and coupling. This indicates that a judicious choice of the zeroth order Hamiltonian to include the major part of the coupling can lead to correct results even in low order perturbation theory.
The Dirac-Frenkel time-dependent variation is employed to probe the dynamics of the zero temperature sub-Ohmic spin-boson model with strong friction utilizing the Davydov D1 ansatz. It is shown that initial conditions of the phonon bath have considerable influence on the dynamics. Counterintuitively, even in the very strong coupling regime, quantum coherence features still manage to survive under the polarized bath initial condition, while such features are absent under the factorized bath initial condition. In addition, a coherent-incoherent transition is found at a critical coupling strength α ≈ 0.1 for s = 0.25 under the factorized bath initial condition. We quantify how faithfully our ansatz follows the Schrödinger equation, finding that the time-dependent variational approach is robust for strong dissipation and deep sub-Ohmic baths (s ≪ 1).
We study the infrared dynamics of low-energy atoms interacting with a sample of suspended graphene at finite temperature. The dynamics exhibits severe infrared divergences order by order in perturbation theory as a result of the singular nature of low-energy flexural phonon emission. Our model can be viewed as a two-channel generalization of the independent boson model with asymmetric atom-phonon coupling. This allows us to take advantage of the exact nonperturbative solution of the independent boson model in the stronger channel while treating the weaker one perturbatively. In the low-energy limit, the exact solution can be viewed as a resummation (exponentiation) of the most divergent diagrams in the perturbative expansion. As a result of this procedure, we obtain the atom's Green function which we use to calculate the atom damping rate, a quantity equal to the quantum sticking rate. A characteristic feature of our results is that the Green's function retains a weak, infrared cutoff dependence that reflects the reduced dimensionality of the problem. As a consequence, we predict a measurable dependence of the sticking rate on graphene sample size. We provide detailed predictions for the sticking rate of atomic hydrogen as a function of temperature and sample size. The resummation yields an enhanced sticking rate relative to the conventional Fermi golden rule result (equivalent to the one-loop atom self-energy), as higher-order processes increase damping at finite temperature.
The Dirac-Frenkel variational method with Davydov D2{\text{D}}_{2}D2​ trial wavefunction is extended by introducing a thermalization algorithm and applied to simulate dynamics of a general open quantum system. The algorithm allows to control temperature variations of a harmonic finite-size bath when in contact with the quantum system. Thermalization of the bath vibrational modes is realized via stochastic scatterings, implemented as a discrete-time Bernoulli process with Poisson statistics. It controls bath temperature by steering vibrational modes' evolution towards their canonical thermal equilibrium. Numerical analysis of the exciton relaxation dynamics in a small molecular cluster reveals that thermalization additionally provides significant calculation speedup due to the reduced number of vibrational modes needed to obtain the convergence.