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Physical review. B, Condensed matter

Influence of nonlinear dissipation on quantum tunneling

Peter S. Riseborough

Published Jun 1, 1991• 4 citations
Publisher

Abstract

The influence of a nonlinear dissipation mechanism on the dynamics of a particle, which performs tunneling through a potential barrier, is investigated. The particular dissipation mechanism considered contains terms quadratic in the normal modes of the heat bath, in addition to linear couplings. The nonlinear terms are shown to affect the incoherent tunneling rate.

DOI
10.1103/physrevb.43.13269

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The influence of a nonlinear dissipation mechanism on the dynamics of a particle, which performs tunneling through a potential barrier, is investigated. The particular dissipation mechanism considered contains terms quadratic in the normal modes of the heat bath, in addition to linear couplings. The nonlinear terms are shown to affect the incoherent tunneling rate.
The quantum-mechanical problem of tunneling of a particle coupled to a heat bath that consists of a large number of harmonic oscillators is studied in this paper. Here the equation of motion for the particle which is a nonlinear integro-differential equation is found by eliminating the degrees of freedom of the oscillators. The nonlinear operator equation may be solved by noting that the position operator at the time t can be expanded as a power series in terms of the initial position and momentum with time-dependent c-number coefficients. These coefficients also satisfy nonlinear integro-differential equations. For the problem of dissipative tunneling of a particle in a double-well potential, the first few terms of expansion have been calculated numerically. The expansion parameter in this formulation is a small dimensionless parameter which is inversely proportional to the product of the width and the square root of the height of the barrier.
For the realistic theoretical descriptions of quantum devices, we have to take the unavoidable coupling to their surrounding environment into account. A lot of effort in theoretical physics has been made to describe decoherence effects and the corresponding quantum to classical transition in the past. In these studies, baths are coupled to certain observables making their behavior more classical. In the most general case, a quantum device is affected by environments coupled to different observables. In this thesis, we study the differences emerging from coupling the bath to different observables. In particular, we investigate the situation, where two baths are coupled simultaneously to two conjugate variables (e.g. xˆ and pˆ, denoted dissipative frustration). We study how the interplay of these two baths can lead to interesting effects. After an introduction of the topic, we discuss the results of this thesis in Part II and Part III. In Part II, we study the effect of quantum tunneling in presence of a dissipative interaction with two Ohmic environments to the position xˆ and/or to the momentum pˆ of a particle. In chapter 2, we consider a symmetric double well potential which is important in the context of coherent state preparation, as its ground state is a superposition of being in the left and in the right well. Using the semiclassical approximation to calculate instanton paths within the path integral method, we find that momentum dissipation enhances the coherent tunnel splitting. In presence of dissipative couplings to xˆ and pˆ, the momentum dissipation acts in favor of the delocalization of the particle shifting the critical coupling strength of the dissipative phase transition induced by the position dissipation. Chapter 3 contains a study of the escape rate out of a metastable well in presence of dissipation. Here we find that the incoherent tunneling rate is exponentially enhanced in presence of momentum dissipation. We further show that the influence of momentum dissipation depends on the slope of the part of barrier the particle escaping through. In presence of both dissipative couplings, we find a non-monotonic behavior of the escape rate as a function of the dissipative couplings strengths. In Part III, we show that it is possible to realize the situation of "dissipative frustration" in Josephson junction chains. In particular, we introduce charge dissipation as a physical realization of the afore introduced momentum coupling. After presenting the circuit elements needed for charge dissipation, we study a chain of Josephson junctions affected by Ohmic baths coupled to the charge and/or the phase. Using a self-consistent harmonic approximation, we determine the phase diagram at zero temperature which exhibits a quantum phase transition between an ordered phase, corresponding to the superconducting state, and a disordered phase, corresponding to the insulating state with localized superconducting charge. Interestingly, we find that the critical line separating the two phases has a non-monotonic behavior as a function of the dissipative coupling strength. Moreover, within the self-consistent harmonic approximation, we analyze the dissipation induced crossover between a first and second order phase transition, showing that dissipative frustration increases the range in which the phase transition is second order. The non-monotonic behavior is also reflected in the purity of the system that quantifies the degree of correlation between the system and the environment, and in the logarithmic negativity as an entanglement measure that encodes the internal quantum correlations in the chain.
We study the escape rate of a particle in a metastable potential in the presence of a dissipative bath coupled to the momentum of the particle. Using the semiclassical bounce technique, we find that this rate is exponentially enhanced. In particular, the influence of momentum dissipation depends on the slope of the barrier that the particle is tunneling through. We investigate also the influence of dissipative baths coupled to the position, and to the momentum of the particle, respectively. In this case the rate exhibits a nonmonotonic behavior as a function of the dissipative coupling strengths. Remarkably, even in the presence of position dissipation, momentum dissipation can enhance exponentially the escape rate in a large range of the parameter space. The influence of the momentum dissipation is also witnessed by the substantial increase of the average energy loss during inelastic (environment-assisted) tunneling.