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The Journal of Chemical Physics

Variational calculation of the tunneling system interacting with a heat bath. II. Dynamics of an asymmetric tunneling system

R. A. Harris, R. Silbey

Published Aug 1, 1985• 152 citations
Publisher

Abstract

The dynamics of tunneling of an asymmetric double well interacting with a heat bath is reexamined in the binary collision dilute gas phase limit and investigated in the harmonic bath case. (a) In both cases dynamic and static asymmetries are additive. (b) In both cases, when the tunneling amplitude is not renormalized to a value of zero, the effect of asymmetry on the approach to equilibrium due to incoherent tunneling only quantitatively differs from the symmetric double well. (c) When the renormalized tunneling amplitude is zero, the asymmetric tunneling turns dephasing into population relaxation. (d) Variational methods again give results in agreement with renormalization group and instanton calculations.

DOI
10.1063/1.449469

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The dynamics of tunneling of an asymmetric double well interacting with a heat bath is reexamined in the binary collision dilute gas phase limit and investigated in the harmonic bath case. (a) In both cases dynamic and static asymmetries are additive. (b) In both cases, when the tunneling amplitude is not renormalized to a value of zero, the effect of asymmetry on the approach to equilibrium due to incoherent tunneling only quantitatively differs from the symmetric double well. (c) When the renormalized tunneling amplitude is zero, the asymmetric tunneling turns dephasing into population relaxation. (d) Variational methods again give results in agreement with renormalization group and instanton calculations.
A variational calculation of the dynamics of a two level system interacting with a bath is presented. The effective tunneling matrix element is renormalized by the interaction with the bath. For the case of a bath with ohmic dissipation (or infrared divergence), the variational calculation gives a vanishing tunneling at T=0 for critical values of the coupling and gives a highly unusual temperature dependence for the tunneling rate for large kT, all of which agree with recent path integral calculations. The present method also yields results for intermediate temperatures and coupling. This indicates that a judicious choice of the zeroth order Hamiltonian to include the major part of the coupling can lead to correct results even in low order perturbation theory.
A benchmark calculation is presented for the quantum dynamics of tunnelling through a multidimensional asymmetric double well potential. A model Hamiltonian is used with a 1-dimensional tunnelling mode coupled to an ( M − 1)-dimensional harmonic bath, a system-bath problem. The benchmark calculation uses a basis set expansion of the wavefunction, with separate basis functions for the system and bath. Indistinguishability of configurations is exploited to greatly reduce the expense of the calculation, and a fully converged result is achieved. Comparison is offered to existing quantum dynamical methods that have tested this model problem, and further benchmark results not previously studied are presented.
There has been considerable interest recently in the low temperature dynamics of condensed phase tunneling phenomena. In this paper we consider the interplay between quasiparticle transport and vibrational relaxation; the former taking place via tunneling in a double well potential, and the latter occurring due to interactions of the tunneling system with a harmonic bath. Taking the system–bath interactions to be linear in the bath coordinates, and explicitly allowing for a vibrationally excited well, we present a unified treatment of the weak and strong coupling regimes and obtain reduced equations of motion for the tunneling particle position operator. Solutions are obtained for several important limiting cases. In particular, we find that at sufficiently low temperatures, the dynamical behavior strongly resembles that of multisite spin jump model.
A canonical framework for chiral two-level systems coupled to a bath of harmonic oscillators is developed to extract, from a stochastic dynamics, the thermodynamic equilibrium values of both the population difference and coherences. The incoherent and coherent tunneling regimes are analyzed for an Ohmic environment in terms of a critical temperature defined by the maximum of the heat capacity. The corresponding numerical results issued from solving a non-linear coupled system of equations are fitted to approximate path-integral analytical expressions beyond the so-called non-interacting blip approximation in order to determine the different time scales governing both regimes.