In this lecture course I outline a simple paradigm of non-eqjuilibrium quantum statistical physics, namely we shall study quantum lattice systems with local, Hamiltonian (conservative) interactions which are coupled to the environment via incoherent processes only at the system's boundaries. This is arguably the simplest nontrivial context where one can study far from equilibrium steady states and their transport properties. We shall formulate the problem in terms of a many-body Markovian master equation (the so-called Lindblad equation, and some of its extensions, e.g. the Redfield eqaution). The lecture course consists of two main parts: Firstly, and most extensively we shall present canonical Liouville-space many-body formalism, the so-called 'third quantization' and show how it can be implemented to solve bi-linear open many-particle problems, the key peradigmatic examples being the XY spin 1/2 chains or quasi-free bosonic (or harmonic) chains. Secondly, we shall outline several recent approaches on how to approach exactly solvable open quantum interacting many-body problems, such as anisotropic Heisenberg ((XXZ) spin chain or fermionic Hubbard chain.
In this lecture course I outline a simple paradigm of non-eqjuilibrium quantum statistical physics, namely we shall study quantum lattice systems with local, Hamiltonian (conservative) interactions which are coupled to the environment via incoherent processes only at the system's boundaries. This is arguably the simplest nontrivial context where one can study far from equilibrium steady states and their transport properties. We shall formulate the problem in terms of a many-body Markovian master equation (the so-called Lindblad equation, and some of its extensions, e.g. the Redfield eqaution). The lecture course consists of two main parts: Firstly, and most extensively we shall present canonical Liouville-space many-body formalism, the so-called 'third quantization' and show how it can be implemented to solve bi-linear open many-particle problems, the key peradigmatic examples being the XY spin 1/2 chains or quasi-free bosonic (or harmonic) chains. Secondly, we shall outline several recent approaches on how to approach exactly solvable open quantum interacting many-body problems, such as anisotropic Heisenberg ((XXZ) spin chain or fermionic Hubbard chain.
Understanding the fate of many-body quantum physics in the presence of noise is of both practical and fundamental interest. Practically, all quantum systems (especially near-term experiments) are interacting with their environment, and so understanding the role that noise plays is crucial to making predictions of observations. Fundamentally, one can find novel physical phenomena in open systems that exists only out of equilibrium. This motivates trying to get a basic understanding of mixed state phases of matter. This dissertation will be in two parts, linked by the common theme of understanding the dynamics and steady states of open, many-body quantum systems. We will first ask about dissipative state preparation, or thinking about how one can use openness in a quantum system to engineer interesting quantum states. We will present a number of exact solutions for spins, free bosons, and free fermions that have unique properties in the steady state, be they highly entangled or topological in nature. Then, we will discuss their dynamics, and present fundamental limits on the time it takes to prepare highly entangled states under local Markovian channels, and also ways that one can use additional ingredients to evade these bounds. The second part will focus on a novel technique to simulate the dynamics of open spin-1/2 systems whose coupling to the environment will formally make them interacting. This technique relies on encoding the many-body density matrix into a stochastic covariance matrix of the Jordan-Wigner fermions which we show can be sampled from efficiently. We use this technique to uncover rich phenomena outlined in a number of many-body systems, as well as provide certain situations in which the stochastic observables can be analytically re-averaged to get closed form solutions for the entire interacting system.
The study of open quantum systems forms one of the main problems of modern physics. This thesis aims at contributing to this field, and focuses on the investigation of non-Markovian dynamics of open quantum systems. Here, as a special case, quantum many-body systems provide for a rich field of research. With the ability to control them being of essential importance for the development of quantum technologies, the characterization of their dynamical properties has also drawn a lot of interest lately. One of the main methodological tasks in the study of open quantum systems is to reduce the infinite degrees of freedom of the total system. In order to achieve this, the thesis makes use of the tensor network method matrix product states and combines it with the picture of the quantum stochastic Schrödinger equation. However, when computing the dynamics of many-body systems of system size N, even the reduced system dynamics scale with 2N, making larger system sizes difficult to access. Therefore, especially when computing non-Markovian time-dynamics where the information backflow from the reservoir has to be taken into account, efficiently constructed algorithms are required. This thesis proposes these type of algorithms and demonstrates their application. They enable an access to larger system sizes, thus making it possible to investigate non-equilibrium steady-states of quantum many-body systems in a non-Markovian interaction for system sizes up to N=30. This thesis consists of three parts. The first part provides an introduction to the theory of open quantum systems and to the methodology for modeling them. The second part examines many-body system-reservoir interaction in the non-Markovian regime by investigating the case of fully coherent self-feedback. It uses the one-dimensional Heisenberg spin-1/2 chain as a paradigmatic and recently intensely studied many-body system. It is demonstrated that this gives rise to new conditions for the feedback phase and to highly non-trivial states within the system as well as to the possibility of partially characterizing the system non-invasively and storing excitation within it. Next, a novel approach to the boundary-driven Heisenberg chain is presented, where the chain is exposed to a coherent driving field, thus enabling a comparison to the well-studied incoherently driven model. The third part demonstrates the use of an external pump to control the feedback phase of a Lambda-type three-level system, where the external pump pulse is shown to be a new control parameter. The thesis concludes with the proposition to enhance the indistinguishability of two photons by feedback control.
Introduction to Integrable Many-Body Systems II This is the second part of a three-volume introductory course about integrable systems of interacting bodies. The models of interest are quantum spin chains with nearest-neighbor interactions between spin operators, in particular Heisenberg spin-1/2 models. The Ising model in a transverse field, expressible as a quadratic fermion form by using the Jordan-Wigner transformation, is the subject of Sect. 12. The derivation of the coordinate Bethe ansatz for the XXZ Heisenberg chain and the determination of its absolute ground state in various regions of the anisotropy parameter are presented in Sect. 13. The magnetic properties of the ground state are explained in Sect. 14. Sect. 15 concerns excited states and the zero-temperature thermodynamics of the XXZ model. The thermodynamics of the XXZ Heisenberg chain is derived on the basis of the string hypothesis in Sect. 16; the thermodynamic Bethe ansatz equations are analyzed in high-temperature and low-temperature limits. An alternative derivation of the thermodynamics without using strings, leading to a non-linear integral equation determining the free energy, is the subject of Sect. 17. A nontrivial application of the Quantum Inverse Scattering method to the fully anisotropic XYZ Heisenberg chain is described in Sect. 18. Sect. 19 deals with integrable cases of isotropic spin chains with an arbitrary spin.
In the thesis we present an analytic approach towards exact description for steady state density operators of nonequilibrium quantum dynamics in the framework of open systems. We employ the so-called quantum Markovian semi-group evolution, i.e. a general form of time-autonomous positivity and trace-preserving dynamical equation for reduced density operators, by only allowing unitarity-breaking dissipative terms acting at the boundaries of a system. Such setup enables to simulate macroscopic reservoirs for different values of effective thermodynamic potentials, causing incoherent transitions between quantum states which are modeled with aid of the Lindblad operators. This serves as a simple minimalistic model for studying quantum transport properties, either in the linear response domain or in more general regimes far from canonical equilibrium. We are mainly exploring possibilities of identifying nonequilibrium situations which are amenable to exact description within matrix product state representation, by exclusively focusing on steady states, i.e. fixed points of the Lindblad equation, of certain prototypic interacting integrable spin chains driven by incoherent polarizing processes. Finally, we define a concept of pseudo-local extensive almost-conserved quantities by allowing a violation of time-invariance up to boundary-localized terms. We elucidate the role of such quantities on non-ergodic behaviour of temporal correlation functions rendering anomalous transport properties. It turns out that such conservation laws can be generated by means of boundary universal quantum transfer operators of the fundamental integrable models.
Open quantum systems have drawn attention over decades due to its applicability in the foundation of theoretical physics, e.g. statistical mechanics, quantum mechanics and condensed matter physics. The dynamics of open quantum systems has been described as separate entities from their surrounding environment that consists of a very large number of modes, somehow coupled to the mode of the system. Even though the exact solution of the dynamical behavior of the system is impossible to calculate, we obtain a tentative solution using the crucial Markov approximation. The input-output formalism of the quantum Langevin equation (QLE) has been considered as a useful tool which provides a semi-classical description of the dynamics of the system, whereas the master equation provides a complete picture of the dynamics of the system expressed in terms of density matrix. While studying the dynamics of nonlinear system/environment coupling using QLE, we see, for a small value of external field, that the steady state system field does not change much from the steady state field obtained in the absence of nonlinear dissipation. However, in a case where a stronger external field is applied, we see that the deviation becomes substantial from the solution of linear system. We also see that the nonlinear coupling introduces significant difference in the cavity fluctuation spectrum. The description, therefore, provides a potential explanation of parametric effects in terms of nonlinear dissipation phenomena associated with the nonlinear coupling. Even though the theories developed in the context of open quantum systems have proven to be powerful tools, they do not provide a satisfactory platform to be implemented on non-linear Hamiltonians. We often approximate it by linearizing over nonlinear steady state field amplitude, and therefore, the interesting effects are often overlooked. The limitation of the analytics provokes us to simulate open quantum dynamics numerically. The numerical method consists of transformation of the environmental degrees of freedom to a one-dimensional many-body chain, and the computational technique includes numerical diagonalization and renormalization process. The time-adaptive density matrix renormalisation group (t-DMRG) is known as one of the most powerful techniques for the simulation of strongly-correlated many-body quantum systems. In this thesis, along with the theoretical modeling, we implement DMRG numerical scheme for the simulation of canonical S/B model by mapping it to one-dimensional harmonic chain with nearest neighbor interactions, and use the method to investigate the dynamics of the free dissipative system. The thermalization of open quantum systems is also studied by generating minimally entangled typical thermal states (METTS) through imaginary time evolution, and real-time evolving an empty system in the presence of the thermal bath. Further, we simulate coherently driven free dissipative Kerr nonlinear system numerically using Euler's method by solving Heisenberg equation of motion and t-DMRG algorithm, and demonstrate how the numerical results are analogous to classical bistability. By comparing with analytics, we see that the DMRG numerics is analogous to the quantum-mechanical exact solution obtained by mapping the equation of motion of the density matrix of the system to a Fokker-Plank equation. The comparison between two different numerical techniques shows that the semi-classical Euler's method determines the dynamics of the system field of one among two coherent branches, whereas DMRG numerics gives the superposition of both of them. Hence, DMRG-determined time dynamics undergoes generating non-classical states. Our approach of dealing with nonlinearity represents an important contribution in the developments of technique to study the dynamical and steady-state behavior of open quantum systems, which is a fundamental aspect of quantum physics.
The study of many-body quantum physics has been recently challenged by the appearance of an increasing number of experimental platforms where genuine quantum phenomena take place notwithstanding the presence of an environment and of dissipation. Exciton-polaritons, lossy atomic and molecular gases, cavity QED arrays, arrays of trapped ions and Rydberg atoms, are only few prominent examples of a long list. The present work is ideally divided into two parts, the former is devoted to methodological results; the latter to the theoretical characterization of experimental data. Whereas the notion of equilibrium has been a fruitful guide to the development of standard many-body physics, these setups are inherently out of equilibrium and their modelisation requires the introduction of new theoretical tools. Several methods for addressing this dissipative out-of-equilibrium dynamics have been proposed, based for instance on quantum trajectories, truncated Wigner expansions, tensor networks, machine learning, but the solution of many-body physics for open quantum systems remains a formidable task. Clearly, techniques developed in the framework of Hamiltonian closed systems are a continuous source of inspiration for novel developments, and in this work we present the generalization of one such technique, the so-called flow equations, to the dissipative framework where the generator of the dynamics is a linear non-Hermitian operator; notable examples include non-Hermitian Hamiltonians and Lindblad master equations. In the second part of this work we focus on two-body lossy dynamics in strongly-correlated cold atomic gases. In particular, we derive an effective description for the long-time dynamics of a spin ½ fermionic system by extending a pre-existing theory for the bosonic case.