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International Conference on Path Integrals

ENVIRONMENTAL EFFECTS ON THE THERMODYNAMICS OF QUANTUM SPIN SYSTEMS

Ruggero Vaia, Alessandro Cuccoli, Andrea Fubini, V. Tognetti

Published Nov 1, 2008• 0 citations
Publisher

Abstract

A magnetic system is usually described in terms of the exchange coupling between neighboring spins lying on the sites of a given lattice. Our goal here is to account for the unavoidable quantum effects due to the further coupling with the vibrations of the ions constituting the lattice. A Caldeira-Leggett scheme allows one to treat such effects through the analysis of the associated influence action, obtained after tracing-out the phonons. In a physically sound model, it turns out that one must deal with an environmental coupling which is nonlinear in the system's variables. The corresponding path integral can be dealt with by suitably extending the pure-quantum self-consistent harmonic approximation. In this way one can obtain extended phase diagrams for magnetic phase transitions, accounting for the environmental interaction.

DOI
10.1142/9789812837271_0073

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A magnetic system is usually described in terms of the exchange coupling between neighboring spins lying on the sites of a given lattice. Our goal here is to account for the unavoidable quantum effects due to the further coupling with the vibrations of the ions constituting the lattice. A Caldeira-Leggett scheme allows one to treat such effects through the analysis of the associated influence action, obtained after tracing-out the phonons. In a physically sound model, it turns out that one must deal with an environmental coupling which is nonlinear in the system's variables. The corresponding path integral can be dealt with by suitably extending the pure-quantum self-consistent harmonic approximation. In this way one can obtain extended phase diagrams for magnetic phase transitions, accounting for the environmental interaction.
Theoretical models of quantum systems in the presence of their environment find many applications, ranging from condensed matter physics to quantum information science and quantum thermodynamics. In the field of macroscopic quantum systems, the Caldeira-Leggett model has been employed to study the effects of thermal baths on the coherence properties of superconducting qubits. However, if the quantum system of interest consists of many electrons in a solid, the role of the environment can be played by a quantum field of lattice vibrations, i.e. phonons, modeled by means of noninteracting bosons . In this work, we studied widely known models of quantum systems linearly coupled to their bosonic environment, ranging from simple driven two-level systems, i.e. qubits, to many electrons systems. Our approach has been focused on interesting model parameter ranges where well-established weak-coupling approximations fail in describing the physics involved. Indeed, these regimes are interesting and accessible to experiments. In the case of a driven qubit in contact with its environment, strong coupling effects in system-bath interactions, decoherence and crossover to totally incoherent tunneling dynamics have been studied. In addition, by considering prototypical models of fermionic systems strongly coupled to phonons on a lattice, we studied how topological features can be dramatically modified in the presence of electron-phonon interaction.
We study a model for treating dissipative systems, a one dimensional quantum system coupled to a harmonic bath. The dynamics of such a system can be described by Feynman’s path integral expression for the reduced density matrix. In this formulation the interaction of the system with the environment is stored in the influence functional. Recently we showed that fast environmental modes that give rise to correlations in the influence functional which are short range in time can be treated efficiently by a memory equation algorithm, which is a discretized version of a master equation. In this work we extend this approach to treat slow environmental modes as well, thereby efficiently linking adiabatic and nonadiabatic regimes. In this extended method the long range correlations in the influence functional arising from slow bath modes are taken into account through Stock’s semiclassical self-consistent-field approach.
The system-plus-reservoir (SPR) model is the most common and effective approach to study quantum dissipative effects. Indeed, it makes quantization possible by considering the whole energy-conserving system, while the reservoir's degrees of freedom, assumed to be harmonic, can be traced out by the path-integral technique, leading to a formulation that only includes the system of interest. In the standard SPR model the environment is only coupled with the system's coordinate and turns out to quench its quantum fluctuations. However, there are physical systems coupled with an environment whose "coordinates" and "momenta" can be completely interchangeable (e.g., magnets), so an SPR coupling must symmetrically affect both canonical variables. In this paper such a general environmental coupling is studied in the case of a harmonic oscillator. It is found that quantum fluctuations are generally enhanced by environmental coupling with an unexpected nonmonotonic behavior. This leads one to speculate about the possibility that spin-lattice coupling could drive the two-dimensional Heisenberg antiferromagnet to reach its quantum-critical point.
We consider quantum nonlinear many-body systems with dissipation described within the Caldeira-Leggett model, i.e., by a nonlocal action in the path integral for the density matrix. Approximate classical-like formulas for thermodynamic quantities are derived for the case of many degrees of freedom, with general kinetic and dissipative quadratic forms. The underlying scheme is the pure-quantum self-consistent harmonic approximation (PQSCHA), equivalent to the variational approach by the Feynman-Jensen inequality with a suitable quadratic nonlocal trial action. A low-coupling approximation permits us to get manageable PQSCHA expressions for quantum thermal averages with a classical Boltzmann factor involving an effective potential and an inner Gaussian average that describes the fluctuations originating from the interplay of quanticity and dissipation. The application of the PQSCHA to a quantum phi(4) chain with Drude-like dissipation shows nontrivial effects of dissipation, depending upon its strength and bandwidth.
Open quantum systems often interact with complex, intractable quantum environments. Establishing a minimal solvable model that captures the essential effects of these environments on central quantum systems has long been of interest in physics, dating back to the origins of quantum mechanics. The Caldeira-Leggett oscillator bath model has become a prominent minimal model that effectively represents many quantum environments. However, it has been argued that this model cannot capture the main effects of spin environments on central two-level systems when the couplings between the spins and the central systems are strong. In contrast, I adopt an appropriate spectral density function for the Caldeira-Leggett model and demonstrate that it can effectively replicate the essential effects of spin environments in the regime of interest. This suggests that the class of the Caldeira-Leggett model is more universal than previously recognized.
The phase diagram of two-dimensional Josephson arrays is studied by means of the mapping to the quantum XY\mathrm{XY}XY model. The quantum effects on the thermodynamics of the system can be evaluated with quantitative accuracy by a semiclassical method, the pure-quantum self-consistent harmonic approximation, and those of dissipation can be included in the same framework by the Caldeira-Leggett model. Within this scheme, the critical temperature of the superconductor-metal transition, which is a Berezinskii-Kosterlitz-Thouless one, can be calculated in an extremely easy way as a function of the quantum coupling and of the dissipation mechanism. Previous quantum Monte Carlo results for the same model appear to be rather inaccurate, while a comparison with experimental data leads us to conclude that the commonly assumed dissipation model is not suitable to describe in detail a real system.