In the linear response theory, it is well known that the response of a quantum system to an external perturbation described by the susceptibility is formulated in the Schrödinger picture. The theory might apply to open quantum systems (or Floquet systems); however, it has ignored the non-Markovian effect in almost all works so far. In this Letter, we propose a new method to address those issues by introducing Heisenberg operators to derive an exact susceptibility for the non-Markovian Floquet periodic driving system. The susceptibility includes all the influences of the environment on the Floquet system. We will show that the susceptibility connects closely to the structure of the Floquet energy spectrum of the whole system (system plus environment). Moreover, we can read out Floquet bound states in the first Brillouin zone of the whole system from the susceptibility. The presented results may find applications in quantum engineering with open systems following modulated periodic evolution in quantum optics.
In the linear response theory, it is well known that the response of a quantum system to an external perturbation described by the susceptibility is formulated in the Schrödinger picture. The theory might apply to open quantum systems (or Floquet systems); however, it has ignored the non-Markovian effect in almost all works so far. In this Letter, we propose a new method to address those issues by introducing Heisenberg operators to derive an exact susceptibility for the non-Markovian Floquet periodic driving system. The susceptibility includes all the influences of the environment on the Floquet system. We will show that the susceptibility connects closely to the structure of the Floquet energy spectrum of the whole system (system plus environment). Moreover, we can read out Floquet bound states in the first Brillouin zone of the whole system from the susceptibility. The presented results may find applications in quantum engineering with open systems following modulated periodic evolution in quantum optics.
We address the issue of the validity of linear response theory for a closed quantum system subject to a periodic external driving. Linear response theory (LRT) predicts energy absorption at frequencies of the external driving where the imaginary part of the appropriate response function is different from zero. Here we show that, for a fairly general nonlinear many-body system on a lattice subject to an extensive perturbation, this approximation should be expected to be valid only up to a time t * depending on the strength of the driving, beyond which the true coherent Schrödinger evolution departs from the linear response prediction and the system stops absorbing energy from the driving. We exemplify this phenomenon in detail with the example of a quantum Ising chain subject to a time-periodic modulation of the transverse field, by comparing an exact Floquet analysis with the standard results of LRT. In this context, we also show that if the perturbation is just local, the system is expected in the thermodynamic limit to keep absorbing energy, and LRT works at all times. We finally argue more generally the validity of the scenario presented for closed quantum many-body lattice systems with a bound on the energy-per-site spectrum, discussing the experimental relevance of our findings in the context of cold atoms in optical lattices and ultra-fast spectroscopy experiments.
We study the dynamics of open quantum systems driven by an external time-periodic force. Combining Floquet theory and the time-convolutionless projection operator technique we derive a time-local quantum master equation which exactly takes into account the periodic driving, while treating the system-environment interaction within second order in the coupling strength without performing the Markov approximation. The resulting equation of motion for the reduced density matrix is called Floquet time-convolutionless master equation. Employing the example of the driven spin-boson system, we demonstrate that this master equation is capable of describing strong non-Markovian effects, while yielding the Floquet-Lindblad master equation in the Markovian limit. A characteristic feature of memory effects in such driven dissipative systems is the emergence of sharp peaks of the trace-distance based non-Markovianity measure as a function of the driving amplitude, which can be traced back to quasienergy crossings leading to almost decoherence-protected subspaces through a quasienergy-induced dissipative decoupling mechanism.
Time-periodic quantum systems are present all over science and technology. They have been successfully studied using Floquet theory, and a broad diversity of interesting phenomena such as coherent destruction of tunnelling, dynamical localization and creation of new phases of matter have been discovered. Furthermore, periodic driving has also been introduced as a tool for engineering novel quantum systems that have no static analogue. Besides these remarkable achievements for isolated systems, in reality, systems always interact with their surroundings. Taking the effect of the environment into account, time-periodic quantum systems have been mainly described using the Floquet-Markov approach, which consists in deriving a weak coupling master equation in the Floquet basis. In this thesis, we focus on how to overcome these standard approximations in the description of driven open quantum systems. We start by providing a general review on the topics of isolated driven systems, open quantum systems and the Floquet-Markov approach, before presenting the main results of this work. Under the effect of high-frequency driving, we provide an analytic solution to a large class of open quantum systems. Our method relies on discrete symmetries of the system-bath Hamiltonian and grants access to the time evolution operator of the full system, including bath degrees of freedom. The solution can be interpreted as the stroboscopic evolution of a family of observables under the influence of an effective static Hamiltonian. This provides a flexible simulation procedure of nontrivial Hamiltonians. The results are exemplified with the driven spin-boson model, where a coherent control of dissipation is observed. By a novel combination of Floquet theory, full counting statistics and a Markovian embedding strategy (reaction coordinate mapping), more intricate scenarios with additional driven system-environment interactions are addressed. Hereby, we can access the dynamics and thermodynamics of a periodically driven thermal machine. For the particular case where the working medium is a two-level system, we identify four different operating regimes, including a heat engine and a refrigerator. As the coupling strength is increased, their efficiency and coefficient of performance decrease and the refrigerator regime disappears. Notably, our model reproduces the setup of laser cooling of trapped ions in a specific parameter limit. Following the same combination of methods, we investigate electron pumping through a single quantum dot with periodically modulated energy and tunnelling amplitudes. In the high-frequency regime, the direction of the current can be controlled with the driving phase and a rectification effect that is exclusive to the non-Markovian character of the model is observed. In the low-frequency regime, we apply an additional transformation to view the model as three independent transport channels and observe that the coupling strength also controls the current direction. Studying charge fluctuations we validate that our model behaves as a single-electron source.
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.
We propose a formulation to obtain the exact susceptibility for system arbitrary operators to the external fields by means of the whole-system Hamiltonian (system plus reservoir) diagonalization methods, where the dissipative effects directly reflect the nature of the structured non-Markovian reservoir. This treatment does not make the Born-Markovian approximation in structured non-Markovian reservoir. The relations between linear response function and bound-states for the system as well as structured reservoir are found, which shows the photon bound-states and continuous energy spectrum can be readout from the susceptibility, respectively. These results are then used to examine the validity of second-order Born-Markovian approximation, where we find interesting features (e.g., bound-states) are lost in the approximate treatments for open systems. We study the dependence of the response function on the type (spectrum density) of interaction between the system and structured reservoir. We also give the physical reasons behind the disappearance of the bound-states in the approximation method. Finally, these results are also extended to a more general quantum network involving an arbitrary number of coupled-bosonic system without rotating-wave approximation. The presented results might open a new door to understand the linear response and the energy spectrum for non-Markovian open systems with structured reservoirs.
Being an exemplary model of open quantum system, the spin-boson model is widely employed in theoretical and experimental studies. Beyond the weak coupling limit, the spin-boson dynamics can be described by a time-nonlocal generalized master equation with a memory kernel accounting for the dissipative effects induced by the bosonic environment. When the spin is in addition modulated by an external time-periodic electromagnetic field, the interplay between dissipation and forcing provides a spectrum of nontrivial asymptotic states, especially so in the regime of nonlinear response. Here we implement the method for evaluating the dissipative Floquet dynamics of non-Markovian systems introduced in Magazzù et al. [Phys. Rev. A 96, 042103 (2017)2469-992610.1103/PhysRevA.96.042103] to obtain these nonequilibrium asymptotic states.