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Europhysics Letters (EPL)

Driven Tunnelling with Dissipation

Thomas Dittrich, B. Oelschlägel, Peter Hänggi A

Published Apr 1, 1993• 92 citations
Publisher

Abstract

We study the quantal dynamics of a harmonically driven quartic double well in the presence of dissipation. A master equation for the reduced density operator is derived in the Floquet representation. In the classical limit, this system corresponds to a Duffing oscillator with Ohmic damping. We present numerical results for the transient time evolution and for the stationary sate. The influence of the weak dissipation on interference effects in the context of driven tunnelling is discussed on the basis of these results. We find that the coherent suppression of tunnelling can be stabilized by reservoir-induced noise for a suitably chosen temperature.

DOI
10.1209/0295-5075/22/1/002

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We study the quantal dynamics of a harmonically driven quartic double well in the presence of dissipation. A master equation for the reduced density operator is derived in the Floquet representation. In the classical limit, this system corresponds to a Duffing oscillator with Ohmic damping. We present numerical results for the transient time evolution and for the stationary sate. The influence of the weak dissipation on interference effects in the context of driven tunnelling is discussed on the basis of these results. We find that the coherent suppression of tunnelling can be stabilized by reservoir-induced noise for a suitably chosen temperature.
The quantum dynamics of a quartic double well, subjected to a harmonically oscillating field, is studied in the framework of the Floquet formalism. The modifications of the familiar tunneling process due to driving and dissipation are investigated numerically and explained in terms of the quasienergy spectrum. In absence of dissipation, there is a onedimensional manifold in the parameter space spanned by amplitude and frequency of the driving force, where tunneling is almost completely suppressed by the coherent driving. The influence of dissipation is described on basis of the reduced density matrix in the Floquet representation. In particular, we consider the effect of weak Ohmic damping. In the classical limit, this system corresponds to a damped bistable Duffing oscillator
Using the parametrically driven harmonic oscillator as a working example, we study two different Markovian approaches to the quantum dynamics of a periodically driven system with dissipation. In the simpler approach, the driving enters the master equation for the reduced density operator only in the Hamiltonian term. An improved master equation is achieved by treating the entire driven system within the Floquet formalism and coupling it to the reservoir as a whole. The different ensuing evolution equations are compared in various representations, particularly as Fokker-Planck equations for the Wigner function. On all levels of approximation, these evolution equations retain the periodicity of the driving, so that their solutions have Floquet form and represent eigenfunctions of a nonunitary propagator over a single period of the driving. We discuss asymptotic states in the long-time limit as well as the conservative and the high-temperature limits. Numerical results obtained within the different Markov approximations are compared with the exact path-integral solution. The application of the improved Floquet-Markov scheme becomes increasingly important when considering stronger driving and lower temperatures.
We study the stabilization of coherent suppression of tunneling in a driven double-well system subject to random periodic delta-function "kicks." We model dissipation due to this stochastic process as a phase diffusion process for an effective two-level system, and derive a corresponding set of Bloch equations with phase damping terms that agree with the periodically kicked system at discrete times. We demonstrate that the ability of noise to localize the system on either side of the double-well potential arises from overdamping of the phase of oscillation, and not from any cooperative effect between the noise and the driving field. The model is investigated with a square wave drive, which has qualitatively similar features to the widely studied cosinusoidal drive, but has the additional advantage of allowing one to derive exact analytic expressions.
We present an approach for efficiently simulating strongly damped quantum systems subjected to periodic driving, employing a periodic matrix product operator representation of the influence functional. This representation enables the construction of a numerically exact Floquet propagator that captures the non-Markovian open system dynamics, thus providing a dissipative analogue to the Floquet Hamiltonian of driven isolated quantum systems. We apply this method to study the asymptotic heating of a reservoir in spin-boson models, characterizing the deviation from equilibrium conditions. Moreover, we show how a local driving of two qubits can be utilized to stabilize a transient entanglement buildup of the qubits originating from the interaction with a common environment. Our results make it possible to directly study both stationary and transient dynamics of strongly damped and driven quantum systems within a transparent theoretical and numerical framework.
In the spectrum of systems showing chaos-assisted tunneling, three-state crossings are formed when a chaotic singlet intersects a tunnel doublet. We study the dissipative quantum dynamics in the vicinity of such crossings. A harmonically driven double well coupled to a bath serves as a model. Markov and rotating-wave approximations are introduced with respect to the Floquet spectrum of the time-dependent central system. The resulting master equation is integrated numerically. We find various types of transient tunneling, determined by the relation of the level width to the inherent energy scales of the crossing. The decay of coherent tunneling can be significantly retarded or accelerated. Modifications of the quantum asymptotic state by the crossing are also studied. The comparison with a simple three-state model shows that in contrast to the undamped case, the participation of states outside the crossing cannot be neglected in the presence of dissipation.
We analyze the behavior of a damped quantum harmonic oscillator immersed in a heat bath with a nonlinear coupling. For this purpose, we construct a generalized master equation (GME) for the reduced density of the oscillator. We specialize the results for a quadratic coupling in the presence of a bosonic reservoir and an Ohmic dissipation model, analyzing the evolution equation for the mean value of the oscillator coordinate. In the asymptotic case we obtain a gain-loss master equation whose transition rates are polynomials in the number of quanta. No explicit solutions other than the equilibrium one can be written, since the standard methods do not apply. The equilibrium solution is investigated and the eigenvalues of the corresponding spectral problem are numerically computed to study the effect of the nonlinearity on the evolution of the system. By means of the Wigner transformation of the GME, we extract a third-order partial derivative equation that represents the semiclassical evolution of the damped oscillator. In the classical limit this is a nonlinear Fokker-Planck equation.