The dynamics of interacting many-particle systems on quantum mechanical scale is a broad subject of research in modern physics. The understanding of the quantum correlations, or entanglement, between the particles in an isolated many-body quantum system may however be challenging, as the amount of interactions may be large. To be able to describe the system in a simpler way, mean field theory is often applied; the interactions of all individual particles are substituted by an averaged effect. First and second order mean field approximations are applied to the equations of motion of the amplitudes <ân> for each mode of the many-body system. In first order mean field, under the assumption that each mode has the same magnitude of the (constant) amplitude, the Kuramoto equation follows for the phases of the complex amplitudes. To study this first order approximation and to refine the mean field solution, the equations of motion have been extended to second order mean field. After that, numerical integration is used to solve the system of coupled differential equations for two modes. The solutions seem unstable, which is verified by defining quantum fluctuations beyond mean field. These are shown not to be negligible for a two mode system.It was discovered that the mean field equations of motion show divergent fluctuations for a system of two modes, which opens a whole set of questions on the validity of the first order mean field approximation and therefore the use of the Kuramoto model for quantum many-body dynamics. The extension to the second order mean field solution might be promising as this does include correlations between the operators.
The dynamics of interacting many-particle systems on quantum mechanical scale is a broad subject of research in modern physics. The understanding of the quantum correlations, or entanglement, between the particles in an isolated many-body quantum system may however be challenging, as the amount of interactions may be large. To be able to describe the system in a simpler way, mean field theory is often applied; the interactions of all individual particles are substituted by an averaged effect. First and second order mean field approximations are applied to the equations of motion of the amplitudes <ân> for each mode of the many-body system. In first order mean field, under the assumption that each mode has the same magnitude of the (constant) amplitude, the Kuramoto equation follows for the phases of the complex amplitudes. To study this first order approximation and to refine the mean field solution, the equations of motion have been extended to second order mean field. After that, numerical integration is used to solve the system of coupled differential equations for two modes. The solutions seem unstable, which is verified by defining quantum fluctuations beyond mean field. These are shown not to be negligible for a two mode system.It was discovered that the mean field equations of motion show divergent fluctuations for a system of two modes, which opens a whole set of questions on the validity of the first order mean field approximation and therefore the use of the Kuramoto model for quantum many-body dynamics. The extension to the second order mean field solution might be promising as this does include correlations between the operators.
Open quantum systems have drawn attention over decades due to its applicability in the foundation of theoretical physics, e.g. statistical mechanics, quantum mechanics and condensed matter physics. The dynamics of open quantum systems has been described as separate entities from their surrounding environment that consists of a very large number of modes, somehow coupled to the mode of the system. Even though the exact solution of the dynamical behavior of the system is impossible to calculate, we obtain a tentative solution using the crucial Markov approximation. The input-output formalism of the quantum Langevin equation (QLE) has been considered as a useful tool which provides a semi-classical description of the dynamics of the system, whereas the master equation provides a complete picture of the dynamics of the system expressed in terms of density matrix. While studying the dynamics of nonlinear system/environment coupling using QLE, we see, for a small value of external field, that the steady state system field does not change much from the steady state field obtained in the absence of nonlinear dissipation. However, in a case where a stronger external field is applied, we see that the deviation becomes substantial from the solution of linear system. We also see that the nonlinear coupling introduces significant difference in the cavity fluctuation spectrum. The description, therefore, provides a potential explanation of parametric effects in terms of nonlinear dissipation phenomena associated with the nonlinear coupling. Even though the theories developed in the context of open quantum systems have proven to be powerful tools, they do not provide a satisfactory platform to be implemented on non-linear Hamiltonians. We often approximate it by linearizing over nonlinear steady state field amplitude, and therefore, the interesting effects are often overlooked. The limitation of the analytics provokes us to simulate open quantum dynamics numerically. The numerical method consists of transformation of the environmental degrees of freedom to a one-dimensional many-body chain, and the computational technique includes numerical diagonalization and renormalization process. The time-adaptive density matrix renormalisation group (t-DMRG) is known as one of the most powerful techniques for the simulation of strongly-correlated many-body quantum systems. In this thesis, along with the theoretical modeling, we implement DMRG numerical scheme for the simulation of canonical S/B model by mapping it to one-dimensional harmonic chain with nearest neighbor interactions, and use the method to investigate the dynamics of the free dissipative system. The thermalization of open quantum systems is also studied by generating minimally entangled typical thermal states (METTS) through imaginary time evolution, and real-time evolving an empty system in the presence of the thermal bath. Further, we simulate coherently driven free dissipative Kerr nonlinear system numerically using Euler's method by solving Heisenberg equation of motion and t-DMRG algorithm, and demonstrate how the numerical results are analogous to classical bistability. By comparing with analytics, we see that the DMRG numerics is analogous to the quantum-mechanical exact solution obtained by mapping the equation of motion of the density matrix of the system to a Fokker-Plank equation. The comparison between two different numerical techniques shows that the semi-classical Euler's method determines the dynamics of the system field of one among two coherent branches, whereas DMRG numerics gives the superposition of both of them. Hence, DMRG-determined time dynamics undergoes generating non-classical states. Our approach of dealing with nonlinearity represents an important contribution in the developments of technique to study the dynamical and steady-state behavior of open quantum systems, which is a fundamental aspect of quantum physics.
For pt.I see ibid. vol.22, p.4877 (1989). Previously (I) the author considered a second-quantised Hamiltonian which can be used to model a large number of important strongly interacting many-body systems. He has shown that the dynamics of such systems can be described exactly using quantum fields. The equations of motion derived in this way are highly nonlinear partial differential equations (PDE). He now uses a standard field theoretical approach where initially the fields are treated as classical functions. He studies the solutions of these equations which remarkably, may be obtained making full use of very recent mathematical discoveries (the symmetry reduction method). He finds exact solutions of the equations of motion for the classical field for each of the four main cases separately found in the preceding paper. These cases may correspond to different physical situations and the last, the second-order case, corresponds to the most general physical situation. Subsequently he outlines possible quantisation procedures for these fields. He then briefly discusses the type of boundary conditions which may be applied to both the classical field and the quantum fluctuations which arise.
A major goal of the semiclassical theory is to understand and treat a quantum system in the regime of large quantum numbers using information from its classical limit. In this framework, quantum phenomena are addressed through a path integral perspective, i.e. the weighted interference of phases accumulated along classical trajectories. While this formalism has been successful in explaining interference phenomena, for instance, in mesoscopic single-particle quantum systems, the recent extension of the semiclassical theory allows now also the treatment of interacting quantum many-body systems. This thesis aims to contribute to these ongoing efforts to apply semiclassical techniques to quantum many-body systems. It is focused on bosonic quantum many-body systems, where the thermodynamic limit of a large number of particles represents an alternative version of a semiclassical limit. Within the derivation of the corresponding semiclassical theory, mean-field equations, i.e. effective nonlinear wave equations describing the matter wave, re-emerge as Hamilton's equations of motion of an abstract Hamilton function, defining the above thermodynamic limit as the classical limit. Within this thesis, two different topics are studied. The first one deals with the so-called “Out-of-Time-Order Correlator” (OTOC), the expectation value of the squared commutator of two local operators at different times. The OTOC provides a direct probe for the presence of chaos in the classical limit (if any) of a quantum many-body system. This is based on that for short times the OTOC directly relates to the stability of classical solutions upon changes in their initial conditions. One of the defining properties of chaos is that this stability displays an exponential growth, with the rate called the classical Lyapunov exponent. Immediately, this implies an exponential growth of the OTOC for short times, from which the Lyapunov exponent can be extracted. For later times, one observes a saturation of the OTOC as a consequence of unitary quantum time evolution. The Ehrenfest time, the time scale which marks the onset of quantum interference, separates these different dynamical behaviors. In this thesis a thorough understanding of the concept of chaos in the classical limit of quantum many-body systems is provided, and with that the underlying interference mechanisms involved in the early exponential growth and the later saturation of OTOCs are identified. It is found that the pre-Ehrenfest time exponential growth is given through the interference of multiple contributions, all of them essentially following only a single solution of mean-field equations. Conversely the post-Ehrenfest time behavior stems from the contributions of fundamentally different mean-field solutions, which display correlated dynamics only for a limited amount of time, of the order of Ehrenfest time. The second topic covered in this thesis deals with the coherent transport of cold bosonic atoms through an Aharonov-Bohm ring structure. This setup consists of two semi-infinite wave guides attached on the opposite sides of a wave guide ring which is pierced by a synthetic gauge field. Within the ring, the atoms are further subject to both a weak disorder potential and particle-particle interaction. In the non-interacting case, the disorder-averaged transmission probability as a function of the encircled flux displays the well-known Al'tshuler-Aronov-Spivak (AAS) oscillations, i.e. oscillations with a frequency twice as large as Aharonov-Bohm oscillations. This thesis provides further insight into the influence of a weak particle-particle interaction on AAS oscillations, for which numerical results predict an interaction-based inversion of peaks. Here, using semiclassical techniques to solve the corresponding mean-field problem, this inversion is successfully reproduced, and a first indicator of the relevant mechanism leading to the inversion is found through contributions of self-averaging scattering path constellations.
Exactly solvable many-body systems are few and far between, and the utility of approximate methods cannot be overestimated. Entanglement mean field theory is an approximate method to handle such systems. While mean field theories reduce the many-body system to an effective single-body one, entanglement mean field theory reduces it to a two-body system. And in contrast to mean field theories where the self-consistency equations are in terms of single-site physical parameters, those in entanglement mean field theory are in terms of both single- and two-site parameters. Hitherto, the theory has been applied to predict properties of the static states, like ground and thermal states, of many-body systems. Here we give a method to employ it to predict properties of time-evolved states. The predictions are then compared with known results of paradigmatic spin Hamiltonians.
Can synchronization -- the widespread spontaneous emergence of coordinated dynamics in classical nonlinear systems -- also occur in the quantum regime? This question has recently sparked intense research into collective behavior and temporal self-organization in quantum systems. Typical quantum features such as the linearity of time evolution and the presence of quantum noise seem to hinder the appearance of synchrony at the microscopic level. At the same time, quantum coherence and quantum correlations may provide novel mechanisms for enhancing synchronization beyond its classical counterpart. We here survey recent theoretical and experimental advances in quantum synchronization, ranging from the characterization of synchronous oscillations and genuinely nonclassical forms of synchrony to many-body synchronization on quantum networks.
Interacting many-body quantum systems are in general difficult to treat. Getting an accurate description of the ground state of a many-body system is hard but standard techniques based on Monte Carlo methods are available. Getting the spectrum of elementary excitations is more involved, and approximation techniques based on elaborated perturbative approaches are in order. In the work the student will have to learn and use the theory of Corrlated Basis Functions, which allows for a reliable estimation of the dynamic structure function of a system of bosons.