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Physical Review A

Quantum dynamics of a damped particle in a tight-binding lattice

Maura Sassetti, Manfried Milch, Ulrich Weiß

Published Oct 1, 1992• 14 citations
Publisher

Abstract

The motion of a quantum particle in a tight-binding lattice coupled to an Ohmic thermal reservoir is analyzed in the path-integral formalism. We derive exact formal expressions for moments of the probability distribution both for noncorrelated and correlated thermal initial states of the particle-plus-reservoir complex. Based on these expressions we discuss the role of initial conditions on the subsequent motion and calculate the differences in the transient behavior. For a particular value of the damping strength we find the exact solution of the dynamics in analytic form at any time, temperature, and bias for the two kinds of initial states.

DOI
10.1103/physreva.46.4615

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The motion of a quantum particle in a tight-binding lattice coupled to an Ohmic thermal reservoir is analyzed in the path-integral formalism. We derive exact formal expressions for moments of the probability distribution both for noncorrelated and correlated thermal initial states of the particle-plus-reservoir complex. Based on these expressions we discuss the role of initial conditions on the subsequent motion and calculate the differences in the transient behavior. For a particular value of the damping strength we find the exact solution of the dynamics in analytic form at any time, temperature, and bias for the two kinds of initial states.
The motion of a quantum particle with Ohmic damping in a tight-binding lattice is discussed. An exact series representation in powers of the tunnelmatrix element \ensuremath{\Delta} for moments of the probability distribution is given. The dynamics at zero and at finite temperatures in the presence of an external force is solved exactly to all orders of \ensuremath{\Delta} for a particular value of the friction coefficient, \ensuremath{\eta}=\ensuremath{\pi}\ensuremath{\Elzxh}/d2{d}^{2}d2, where d is the lattice constant, and also for very weak damping.
The quantum-mechanical motion of a free particle coupled to a linearly dissipative environment is analyzed in the Hamiltonian formalism. The total Hamiltonian is diagonalized and its eigenstates displayed. These results are used to discuss the role of initial conditions on the subsequent motion. A widely used initial condition---heat bath uncoupled from particle---is compared with another one in which the initial off-diagonal coherence of the reduced density matrix is comparable to that in the state of thermal equilibrium of the coupled system. Different transient behaviors, on time scales longer than the inverse cutoff frequency of the bath are found. The mean-square momentum of the particle in the steady state is found to depend on this highest bath frequency. An analysis of the correlated states of particle and heat reservoir shows that the latter behaves in some sense like a position-measuring apparatus.
We investigate the exact dynamics of the damped quantum harmonic oscillator under the (un)correlated initial conditions. The master equation is generalized to the cases of the arbitrary factorized state and/or Gaussian state. We show that the variances of the factorized Gaussian state do not sensitively depend on the initial oscillator-bath correlation, which however can remarkably affect the mean values even at high temperature. We also illustrate that the correlations among the factorized states still give rise to the initial dips during the purity evolutions, which can be smoothed out by increasing the amount of correlation to some extent. We finally study the effects of repeated measurements on the time evolution of the damped oscillator analytically, which are compared with the weak coupling results to indicate that they give rather different transient behaviors even for an intermediate coupling.
We introduce a new approach for calculating quantum time-correlation functions and time-dependent expectation values in many-body thermal systems; both electronically adiabatic and non-adiabatic cases can be treated. Our approach uses a path integral simulation to sample an initial thermal density matrix; subsequent evolution of this density matrix is equivalent to solution of the time-dependent Schrödinger equation, which we perform using a linear expansion of Gaussian wavepacket basis functions which evolve according to simple classical-like trajectories. Overall, this methodology represents a formally exact approach for calculating time-dependent quantum properties; by introducing approximations into both the imaginary-time and real-time propagations, this approach can be adapted for complex many-particle systems interacting through arbitrary potentials. We demonstrate this method for the spin Boson model, where we find good agreement with numerically exact calculations. We also discuss future directions of improvement for our approach with a view to improving accuracy and efficiency.
We consider quantum transport of non-interacting particles in a tight-binding chain coupled to Markovian reservoirs at its boundaries and subject to uniform on-site dephasing. Using the masterequation approach, we derived the exact analytic solution for the mean current along the chain. This analytic solution is obtained in the framework of single-particle quantum mechanics and, thus, equally applies for transport of non-interacting bosons and fermions. In the absence of phase damping, the results are extended to the complete many-body solution for bosonic problem in the form of anti-normally ordered characteristic function. This function allows us to calculate the distribution function for the current at each bond in the chain as well as the inter-bond current correlation functions.
Abstract The quantum dissipative dynamics of a particle which tunnels through the barrier of a double well potential and is coupled to an Ohmic heat bath is studied. Exact formal expressions for correlation functions are presented and examined. Attention is focused on the region in which coherence effects are important, and on the algebraic long‐time tails at zero temperature. Coherence effects in the dissipative quantum transport of a particle in a tight‐binding lattice are also investigated.