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Journal of Physics A Mathematical and General

Non-unitary transformation of conservative to dissipative evolutions

Ioannis E. Antoniou, Baidyanath Misra

Published Jun 21, 1991• 24 citations
Publisher

Abstract

The authors briefly review in a general context the theory of non-unitary transformations between conservative dynamics with internal time and dissipative evolutions, developed previously in the context of statistical mechanics and apply the results to show the existence of a similarity transformation between the wave equation and the dissipative telegraphist equation.

DOI
10.1088/0305-4470/24/12/012

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The authors briefly review in a general context the theory of non-unitary transformations between conservative dynamics with internal time and dissipative evolutions, developed previously in the context of statistical mechanics and apply the results to show the existence of a similarity transformation between the wave equation and the dissipative telegraphist equation.
We test the idea that transformations which, at the classical level, can be interpreted as evolutions are represented within quantum mechanics by unitary operators. To this end, we consider non-trivial canonical transformations which leave invariant the form of the Hamilton function of a system. We demonstrate that infinite families of such transformations exist for a variety of familiar conservative systems of one degree of freedom. We show how the precise form of integral equations for the stationary state wavefunctions implied by the existence of these canonical transformations can be pinned down by exploiting the algebra of the transformations and a symmetry of their generating functions. We recover several integral equations found in the literature on standard special functions of mathematical physics. We find that when one of the classical canonical transformations we consider is non-linear, its quantum implementation is non-unitary. We end with some comments on the implications of our findings for semiclassical studies and a brief discussion relevant to string theory of the generalization to scalar field theories in 1 + 1 dimensions.
We discuss a new analytical approach to real-time evolution in quantum many-body systems. Our approach extends the framework of continuous unitary transformations such that it amounts to a novel solution method for the Heisenberg equations of motion for an operator. It is our purpose to illustrate the accuracy of this approach by studying dissipative quantum systems on all timescales. In particular, we obtain results for non-equilibrium correlation functions for general initial conditions. We illustrate our ideas for the exactly solvable dissipative oscillator and, as a non-trivial model, for the dissipative two-state system.
Abstract In the context of quantum dynamics there exists a coordinate transformation which maps the free particle to the harmonic oscillator. Here we extend this result by reformulating it as a unitary operation followed by a time coordinate transformation. We demonstrate that an equivalent transformation can be performed for classical systems in the context of Koopman–von Neumann dynamics. We further extend this mapping both to dissipative evolutions as well as for a quantum–classical hybrid, and show that this mapping imparts an identical time-dependent scaling on the dissipation parameters for both types of dynamics. The derived classical procedure presents a number of opportunities to import squeezing dependent quantum procedures (such as Hamiltonian amplification) into the classical regime.
Open quantum many-body systems are commonly described by Lindblad master equations, yet the treatment of Lindbladian operators in the thermodynamic limit remains a major challenge. We develop a framework for constructing effective quasiparticle-conserving Lindbladian operators directly in the thermodynamic limit. Our approach extends continuous similarity transformations to non-Hermitian open quantum systems and enables the systematic block diagonalization of Lindbladians with respect to the quasiparticle (qp) number. We formulate two complementary methods. The first, projective continuous similarity transformations (pcst++), generalizes perturbative continuous unitary transformations to Lindblad operators so that a linked-cluster expansion allows us to obtain high-order series expansions of the infinite system. The second, deepCST, extends directly evaluated enhanced perturbative continuous unitary transformations by combining the same qp-conserving generator with a perturbative truncation scheme that yields non-perturbative effective Lindbladian operators directly in thermodynamic limit. We apply pcst++ and deepCST to the dissipative transverse-field Ising chain with local dissipation. We focus on the low-Ising regime. We purify the Lindbladian by splitting each spin into two sites. A spin flip then corresponds to two qps. We derive and analyze the effective, qp-conserving Lindbladian in the sectors with zero to two qps. We show how the Ising interaction renormalizes the decay rates of elementary spin-flip excitations and provides the microscopic mechanism for a competition between coherent interactions and dissipation. Our work establishes perturbative and non-perturbative continuous similarity transformations as a versatile tool for deriving effective qp pictures of open quantum many-body systems in the thermodynamic limit.
Quantum mechanics is essentially described in terms of complex quantities like wave functions. The interesting point is that phase and amplitude of the complex quantities are not independent of each other, but coupled by some kind of conservation law. This coupling exists in time-independent quantum mechanics as well as in in its time-dependent form. It can be traced back to a reformulation of quantum mechanics in terms of complex nonlinear Riccati equations, where the quadratic term in the latter equation explains the origin of the phase-amplitude coupling. Since realistic physical systems are always in contact with some kind of environment this aspect is also taken into account. It turns out that this dissipative effect can either affect the amplitude or the phase of the complex quantity describing the open quantum system. This suggests a relation between non-unitary transformations and gauge-transformations for these systems. A change of the amplitude also seems to be connected with a second quantum of action for "radial" changes, compared to ħ for "angular" changes, leading to an interpretation of Sommerfeld's constant.
In this chapter, we finally introduce time evolution. The development is carried out for finite, enumerable systems (i.e., systems whose states live in a finite dimensional, inner product space) which, of course, allows a straight forward extension to the continuum and infinite dimensional state spaces. The necessary mathematical background of unitary operators, and their properties relevant to quantum mechanics are first introduced. In particular, the fact that preservation of norm under the action of an operator implies unitarity, and that every unitary operator can be expressed as the exponential of i timesa Hermitian operator are introduced. Time evolution is then introduced in its integral form through the time evolution operator, and the Hamiltonian operator is introduced in this context. This approach, however, necessitates the restriction to conservative systems. Next, the differential form of the law of time evolution, i.e., Schrodinger equation, is derived from the time evolution operator, and this is postulated to be the general law of time evolution. We then demonstrate how, for conservative systems, the solution of the Schrodinger equation essentially reduces to solving the eigenvalue problem of the Hamiltonian. Constants of motion and Heisenberg picture have been relegated to the problem section.