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arXiv:2411.08741

Unified error bounds for perturbations of non-Markovian open quantum systems in Gaussian environments

Zhen Huang, Yuanran Zhu, Gunhee Park, Lin Lin

Published Nov 13, 2024• 1 citation
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Abstract

We present perturbative error bounds for the non-Markovian dynamics of observables in open quantum systems interacting with Gaussian environments, governed by a general Liouville dynamics. This extends the work of [Mascherpa et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 118, 100401, 2017], which demonstrated qualitatively tighter bounds over the standard Grönwall-type inequality for unitary system-bath evolution. Our results apply to systems with both bosonic and fermionic environments. Our approach utilizes a superoperator formalism, which avoids the need for formal coherent state path integral calculations, or the dilation of Lindblad dynamics into an equivalent unitary framework with infinitely many degrees of freedom. This enables a unified treatment of a wide range of open quantum systems. These findings provide a solid theoretical basis for various recently developed pseudomode methods in simulating open quantum system dynamics.

DOI
10.48550/arxiv.2411.08741

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We present perturbative error bounds for the non-Markovian dynamics of observables in open quantum systems interacting with Gaussian environments, governed by a general Liouville dynamics. This extends the work of [Mascherpa et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 118, 100401, 2017], which demonstrated qualitatively tighter bounds over the standard Grönwall-type inequality for unitary system-bath evolution. Our results apply to systems with both bosonic and fermionic environments. Our approach utilizes a superoperator formalism, which avoids the need for formal coherent state path integral calculations, or the dilation of Lindblad dynamics into an equivalent unitary framework with infinitely many degrees of freedom. This enables a unified treatment of a wide range of open quantum systems. These findings provide a solid theoretical basis for various recently developed pseudomode methods in simulating open quantum system dynamics.
We identify the conditions that guarantee equivalence of the reduced dynamics of an open quantum system (OQS) for two different types of environments-one a continuous bosonic environment leading to a unitary system-environment evolution and the other a discrete-mode bosonic environment resulting in a system-mode (nonunitary) Lindbladian evolution. Assuming initial Gaussian states for the environments, we prove that the two OQS dynamics are equivalent if both the expectation values and two-time correlation functions of the environmental interaction operators are the same at all times for the two configurations. Since the numerical and analytical description of a discrete-mode environment undergoing a Lindbladian evolution is significantly more efficient than that of a continuous bosonic environment in a unitary evolution, our result represents a powerful, nonperturbative tool to describe complex and possibly highly non-Markovian dynamics. As a special application, we recover and generalize the well-known pseudomodes approach to open-system dynamics.
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We outline a non-perturbative approach for simulating the behavior of open quantum systems interacting with a bosonic environment defined by a generalized spectral density function. The method is based on replacing the environment by a set of damped harmonic oscillators - the pseudomodes - thereby forming an enlarged open system whose dynamics is governed by a Markovian master equation. Each pseudomode is connected to one of the poles of the spectral density when analytically continued to the lower-half complex frequency plane. Here, we extend previous results to a completely generic class of open system models, and discuss how our framework can be used as a powerful and versatile tool for analyzing non-Markovian open system dynamics. The effectiveness of the method is demonstrated on the spin-boson model by accurately benchmarking its predictions against numerically exact results.
A Dissertation on open quantum systems, containing a general review of the current standing of the field, in particular regarding systems interacting with Gaussian environments, as well as original analytical and numerical results. The problem of the impact of a variation in the environmental properties on the reduced dynamics of an open system is investigated analytically, and a new computational technique for the simulation of non-perturbative, non-Markovian open quantum system dynamics based on devising error-certified effective environments is presented.
We present an error-controlled framework for the quantum simulation of non-Markovian open-system dynamics in Gaussian environments. For a system coupled linearly to a Gaussian environment with zero mean, the bath's influence on the reduced dynamics is completely determined by its two-time correlation kernel. This allows us to replace the microscopic environment with an equivalent bath that has the same kernel. On a finite simulation interval, a rank-NNN approximation of the kernel yields an effective bath of NNN bosonic modes with time-dependent couplings to the system. To encode these modes in qubits, we first truncate each mode to its lowest ddd occupation levels. When stronger couplings lead to large occupations, we introduce coupling dilution, which replaces each mode with several more weakly coupled copies while preserving the bath correlation kernel. This distributes excitations across more modes and trades additional modes for smaller local dimensions. We derive explicit reduced-state error bounds and establish polynomial circuit width and depth in simulation time and inverse accuracy under stated spectral-decay and coupling-regularity assumptions, provided elementary unitaries admit polynomial-cost implementations.
Non-Markovian effects are important in modeling the behavior of open quantum systems arising in solid-state physics, quantum optics as well as in study of biological and chemical systems. A common approach to the analysis of such systems is to approximate the non-Markovian environment by discrete bosonic modes thus mapping it to a Lindbladian or Hamiltonian simulation problem. While systematic constructions of such modes have been proposed in previous works [D. Tamascelli et al, PRL (2012), A. W. Chin et al, J. of Math. Phys (2010)], the resulting approximation lacks rigorous convergence guarantees. In this paper, we initiate a rigorous study of the convergence properties of these methods. We show that under some physically motivated assumptions on the system-environment interaction, the finite-time dynamics of the non-Markovian open quantum system computed with a sufficiently large number of modes is guaranteed to converge to the true result. Furthermore, we show that, for most physically interesting models of non-Markovian environments, the approximation error falls off polynomially with the number of modes. Our results lend rigor to numerical methods used for approximating non-Markovian quantum dynamics and allow for a quantitative assessment of classical as well as quantum algorithms in simulating non-Markovian quantum systems.