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Physical Review A

Input and output in damped quantum systems: Quantum stochastic differential equations and the master equation

Crispin W. Gardiner, Matthew J. Collett

Published Jun 1, 1985• 2,021 citations
Publisher

Abstract

We develop a formulation of quantum damping theory in which the explicit nature of inputs from a heat bath, and of outputs into it, is taken into account. Quantum Langevin equations are developed, in which the Langevin forces are the field operators corresponding to the input modes. Time-reversed equations exist in which the Langevin forces are the output modes, and the sign of damping is reversed. Causality and boundary conditions relating inputs to system variables are developed. The concept of ``quantum white noise'' is formulated, and the formal relationship between quantum Langevin equations and quantum stochastic differential equations (SDE's) is established. In analogy to the classical formulation, there are two kinds of SDE's: the Ito and the Stratonovich forms. Rules are developed for converting from one to the other. These rules depend on the nature of the quantum white noise, which may be squeezed. The SDE's developed are shown to be exactly equivalent to quantum master equations, and rules are developed for computing multitime-ordered correlation functions with use of the appropriate master equation. With use of the causality and boundary conditions, the relationship between correlation functions of the output and those of the system and the input is developed. It is possible to calculate what kind of output statistics result, provided that one knows the input statistics and provided that one can compute the system correlation functions.

DOI
10.1103/physreva.31.3761

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We develop a formulation of quantum damping theory in which the explicit nature of inputs from a heat bath, and of outputs into it, is taken into account. Quantum Langevin equations are developed, in which the Langevin forces are the field operators corresponding to the input modes. Time-reversed equations exist in which the Langevin forces are the output modes, and the sign of damping is reversed. Causality and boundary conditions relating inputs to system variables are developed. The concept of ``quantum white noise'' is formulated, and the formal relationship between quantum Langevin equations and quantum stochastic differential equations (SDE's) is established. In analogy to the classical formulation, there are two kinds of SDE's: the Ito and the Stratonovich forms. Rules are developed for converting from one to the other. These rules depend on the nature of the quantum white noise, which may be squeezed. The SDE's developed are shown to be exactly equivalent to quantum master equations, and rules are developed for computing multitime-ordered correlation functions with use of the appropriate master equation. With use of the causality and boundary conditions, the relationship between correlation functions of the output and those of the system and the input is developed. It is possible to calculate what kind of output statistics result, provided that one knows the input statistics and provided that one can compute the system correlation functions.
A unified framework of stochastic differential equations for quantum systems, formulated within Non-Equilibrium Thermo Field Dynamics (NETFD), is applied to a model of non-linear damped oscillator. The quantum stochastic Liouville equation and the quantum Langevin equations (both of Ito and Stratonovich type), which are consistent with the corresponding master equation, are written down explicitly in the case of a non-conventional treatment. This solves Kubo's third problem: how one can obtain the correlations of random force operators for the Langevin equation compatible with the master equation derived by the non-conventional treatment of the damping theory.
The quantum-stochastic-differential-equation formulation of driven quantum-optical systems is carried out in the interaction picture, and quantum stochastic differential equations for wave functions are derived on the basis of physical principles. The Ito form is shown to be the most practical, since it already contains all the radiation reaction terms. The connection between this formulation and the master equation is shown to be very straightforward. In particular, a direct connection is made to the theory of continuous measurements, which leads directly to the method of quantum-jump simulations of solutions of the master equation. It is also shown that all conceivable spectral and correlation-function information in output fields is accessible by means of an augmentation of the simulation process. Finally, the question of the reality of the jumps used in the simulations is posed.
A model independent generalization of quantum mechanics, including the usual as well as the dissipative quantum systems, is proposed. The theory is developed deductively from the basic principles of the standard quantum theory, the only new qualitative assumption being that we allow the wave operator at time t of a quantum system to be non-differentiable (in t) in the usual sense, but only in an appropriately defined (Sec. 5) stochastic sense. The resulting theory is shown to lead to a natural generalization of the usual quantum equations of motion, both in the form of the Schrödinger equation in interaction representation (Sec. 6) and of the Heisenberg equation (Sec. 8). The former equation leads in particular to a quantum fluctuation-dissipation relation of Einstein’s type. The latter equation is a generalized Langevin equation, from which the known form of the generalized master equation can be deduced via the quantum Feynmann-Kac technique (Secs. 9 and 10). For quantum noises with increments commuting with the past the quantum Langevin equation defines a closed system of (usually nonlinear) stochastic differential equations for the observables defining the coefficients of the noises. Such systems are parametrized by certain Lie algebras of observables of the system (Sec. 10). With appropriate choices of these Lie algebras one can deduce generalizations and corrections of several phenomenological equations previously introduced at different times to explain different phenomena. Two examples are considered: the Lie algebra [q, p]=i (Sec. 12), which is shown to lead to the equations of the damped harmonic oscillator; and the Lie algebra of SO(3) (Sec. 13) which is shown to lead to the Bloch equations. In both cases the equations obtained are independent of the model of noise. Moreover, in the former case, it is proved that the only possible noises which preserve the commutation relations of p, q are the quantum Brownian motions, commonly used in laser theory and solid state physics.
The aim of this paper is twofold: to probe the statistical mechanical properties of interacting quantum fields, and to provide a field theoretical justification for a stochastic source term in the Boltzmann equation. We start with the formulation of quantum field theory in terms of the set of Schwinger-Dyson equations for the correlation functions, which we describe by a closed-time-path master $(n=\ensuremath{\infty}\mathrm{PI})$ effective action. When the hierarchy is simply truncated to a certain order, one obtains the usual closed system of correlation functions up to that order, and from the nPIn\mathrm{PI}nPI effective action, a set of time-reversal invariant equations of motion. (This is the Dyson equation, the quantum field theoretical parallel of the collisionless Boltzmann equation.) But when the effect of the higher order correlation functions is included through a causal factorization condition (such as the molecular chaos assumption in Boltzmann's theory) called slaving, the dynamics of the lower order correlations shows dissipative features, as familiar in the usual (dissipative yet noiseless) Boltzmann equation, the field-theoretical version of which being the dissipative Dyson equations. We show that a fluctuation-dissipation relation should exist for such effectively open systems, and use this fact to show that a stochastic term, which explicitly introduces quantum fluctuations in the lower order correlation functions, necessarily accompanies the dissipative term. This leads to a stochastic Dyson equation, which is the quantum field theoretic parallel of the classical Boltzmann-Langevin equation, encompassing both the dissipative and stochastic dynamics of correlation functions.
Classical Brownian motion has well been investigated since the pioneering work of Einstein, which inspired mathematicians to lay the theoretical foundation of stochastic processes. A stochastic formulation for quantum dynamics of dissipative systems described by the system-plus-bath model has been developed and found many applications in chemical dynamics, spectroscopy, quantum transport, and other fields. This article provides a tutorial review of the stochastic formulation for quantum dissipative dynamics. The key idea is to decouple the interaction between the system and the bath by virtue of the Hubbard-Stratonovich transformation or Itô calculus so that the system and the bath are not directly entangled during evolution, rather they are correlated due to the complex white noises introduced. The influence of the bath on the system is thereby defined by an induced stochastic field, which leads to the stochastic Liouville equation for the system. The exact reduced density matrix can be calculated as the stochastic average in the presence of bath-induced fields. In general, the plain implementation of the stochastic formulation is only useful for short-time dynamics, but not efficient for long-time dynamics as the statistical errors go very fast. For linear and other specific systems, the stochastic Liouville equation is a good starting point to derive the master equation. For general systems with decomposable bath-induced processes, the hierarchical approach in the form of a set of deterministic equations of motion is derived based on the stochastic formulation and provides an effective means for simulating the dissipative dynamics. A combination of the stochastic simulation and the hierarchical approach is suggested to solve the zero-temperature dynamics of the spin-boson model. This scheme correctly describes the coherent-incoherent transition (Toulouse limit) at moderate dissipation and predicts a rate dynamics in the overdamped regime. Challenging problems such as the dynamical description of quantum phase transition (local- ization) and the numerical stability of the trace-conserving, nonlinear stochastic Liouville equation are outlined.