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arXiv:2604.01556 · Physical review. B./Physical review. B

Time-evolving matrix product operators for off-diagonal system-bath coupling

Chu Guo, Wei Wu, Xiansong Xu, Tian Jiang, Ping-Xing Chen, Ruofan Chen

Published Jul 29, 2026• 1 citation
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

The time-evolving matrix product operator (TEMPO) method has proven to be a powerful method to study the long-time dynamics of bosonic impurity problems where a small system is linearly coupled to a noninteracting bosonic bath. However, current developments of TEMPO have mostly focused on the case of diagonal system-bath coupling, i.e., $\sum_k \Aop(V_k \bdop_k + \hc)$, with $\Aop$ a Hermitian operator of the system. Based on the process tensor framework, we extend TEMPO to the more general case of off-diagonal system-bath coupling in the form $\sum_k (V_k\Aop\bdop_k + \hc)$, where $\Aop$ could be non-Hermitian. As applications, we study the real-time dynamics of a spin that is coupled to a sub-ohmic bath via the Jaynes-Cummings-type system-bath coupling and compare it against the standard spin-boson model, where we show that the commonly used rotating-wave approximation could be very poor for this bath. We also study the imaginary-time evolution of a bosonic impurity with nonzero on-site interaction that is coupled to a sub-ohmic bath, to illustrate the flexibility of our method. Our method provides a unified framework to understand different variants of TEMPO, and is a promising building block for an impurity solver in the bosonic dynamical mean field theory for the normal phase with a scalar hybridization function.

DOI
10.1103/6tsr-fksv

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The time-evolving matrix product operator (TEMPO) method has proven to be a powerful method to study the long-time dynamics of bosonic impurity problems where a small system is linearly coupled to a noninteracting bosonic bath. However, current developments of TEMPO have mostly focused on the case of diagonal system-bath coupling, i.e., ∑k\Aop(Vk\bdopk+\hc)\sum_k \Aop(V_k \bdop_k + \hc)∑k​\Aop(Vk​\bdopk​+\hc), with \Aop\Aop\Aop a Hermitian operator of the system. Based on the process tensor framework, we extend TEMPO to the more general case of off-diagonal system-bath coupling in the form ∑k(Vk\Aop\bdopk+\hc)\sum_k (V_k\Aop\bdop_k + \hc)∑k​(Vk​\Aop\bdopk​+\hc), where \Aop\Aop\Aop could be non-Hermitian. As applications, we study the real-time dynamics of a spin that is coupled to a sub-ohmic bath via the Jaynes-Cummings-type system-bath coupling and compare it against the standard spin-boson model, where we show that the commonly used rotating-wave approximation could be very poor for this bath. We also study the imaginary-time evolution of a bosonic impurity with nonzero on-site interaction that is coupled to a sub-ohmic bath, to illustrate the flexibility of our method. Our method provides a unified framework to understand different variants of TEMPO, and is a promising building block for an impurity solver in the bosonic dynamical mean field theory for the normal phase with a scalar hybridization function.
The time-evolving matrix product operator (TEMPO) method is a powerful tool for simulating open system quantum dynamics. Typically, it is used in problems with diagonal system-bath coupling, where analytical expressions for discretized influence functional are available. In this work, we aim to address issues related to off-diagonal coupling by extending the TEMPO algorithm to accommodate arbitrary basis sets. The proposed approach is based on computing the derivative of the discretized path integral expression of a generalized influence functional when increasing one time step, which yields an equation of motion valid for non-diagonal basis set and arbitrary number of non-commuting baths. The generalized influence functional is then obtained by integrating the resulting differential equation. Applicability of the the new method is then tested by simulating one- and two- qubit systems coupled to both Z- and X-type baths.
Dynamics of open quantum systems with structured reservoirs can often be simulated efficiently with tensor network influence functionals. The standard variants of the time-evolving matrix product operator (TEMPO) method are applicable when the systems is coupled to Gaussian bosonic baths via hermitian coupling operators that mutually commute. In this work we introduce a generalization to cases where the system is coupled to a single reservoir through multiple non-commuting operators, representing the most general form of linear system-bath coupling. We construct a Gaussian influence functional that properly handles Trotter errors arising from a finite evolution time step, thus ensuring convergence for long evolution times. Based on this result, the uniform TEMPO scheme can be employed to obtain a matrix product operator form of the influence functional, enabling efficient simulations of the real-time dynamics of the open system. As a demonstration, we simulate the time evolution of driven two-level emitters coupled to a bosonic lattice at different lattice sites.
The time-evolving matrix product operators (TEMPO) method, which makes full use of the Feynman-Vernon influence functional, is the state-of-the-art tensor network method for bosonic impurity problems. However, for fermionic impurity problems the Grassmann path integral prohibits application of this method. We develop Grassmann time-evolving matrix product operators, a full fermionic analog of TEMPO, that can directly manipulates Grassmann path integrals with similar numerical cost as the bosonic counterpart. We further propose a zipup algorithm to compute expectation values on the fly without explicitly building a single large augmented density tensor, which boosts our efficiency on top of the vanilla TEMPO. Our method has a favorable complexity scaling over existing tensor network methods, and we demonstrate its performance on the nonequilibrium dynamics of the single-impurity Anderson models. Our method solves the long-standing problem of turning Grassmann path integrals into efficient numerical algorithms, which could significantly change the application landscape of tensor network based impurity solvers, and could also be applied for broader problems in open quantum physics and condensed matter physics.
Developing numerical exact solvers for open quantum systems is a challenging task due to the non-perturbative and non-Markovian nature when coupling to structured environments. The Feynman-Vernon influence functional approach is a powerful analytical tool to study the dynamics of open quantum systems. Numerical treatments of the influence functional including the quasi-adiabatic propagator technique and the tensor-network-based time-evolving matrix product operator method have proven to be efficient in studying open quantum systems with bosonic environments. However, the numerical implementation of the fermionic path integral suffers from the Grassmann algebra involved. In this work, we present a detailed introduction to the Grassmann time-evolving matrix product operator method for fermionic open quantum systems. In particular, we introduce the concepts of Grassmann tensor, signed matrix product operator, and Grassmann matrix product state to handle the Grassmann path integral. Using the single-orbital Anderson impurity model as an example, we review the numerical benchmarks for structured fermionic environments for real-time nonequilibrium dynamics, real-time and imaginary-time equilibration dynamics, and its application as an impurity solver. These benchmarks show that our method is a robust and promising numerical approach to study strong coupling physics and non-Markovian dynamics. It can also serve as an alternative impurity solver to study strongly correlated quantum matter with dynamical mean-field theory.
The Grassmann time-evolving matrix product operator (GTEMPO) method, which represents the Feynman-Vernon influence functional as a temporal matrix product state, has been shown to be a flexible and potentially scalable solution for fermionic quantum impurity problems. In this work, we extend GTEMPO to solve fermionic impurity problems in the Nambu formalism, in which the impurity is coupled to a superconducting bath. A key insight is that by employing the Bogoliubov transformation for the superconducting bath, one could obtain the analytic expression of the Feynman-Vernon influence functional in a similar form to the case of a normal bath, after which the core algorithms of GTEMPO can be straightforwardly adapted. We demonstrate the accuracy of our method by benchmarking it against exact diagonalization in several exactly solvable cases, and against the continuous-time quantum Monte Carlo method using converged dynamical mean field theory (DMFT) iterations on the imaginary contour in the non-integrable case. In all cases, we perform both imaginary- and real-time calculations to illustrate the flexibility of our method. These results illustrate that our method could be potentially useful as an impurity solver in DMFT as well as its non-equilibrium extension for fermionic impurity problems in the Nambu formalism.
In order to model realistic quantum devices it is necessary to simulate quantum systems strongly coupled to their environment. To date, most understanding of open quantum systems is restricted either to weak system-bath couplings or to special cases where specific numerical techniques become effective. Here we present a general and yet exact numerical approach that efficiently describes the time evolution of a quantum system coupled to a non-Markovian harmonic environment. Our method relies on expressing the system state and its propagator as a matrix product state and operator, respectively, and using a singular value decomposition to compress the description of the state as time evolves. We demonstrate the power and flexibility of our approach by numerically identifying the localisation transition of the Ohmic spin-boson model, and considering a model with widely separated environmental timescales arising for a pair of spins embedded in a common environment.