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The Journal of Chemical Physics

Density matrix dynamics in twin-formulation: An efficient methodology based on tensor-train representation of reduced equations of motion

Raffaele Borrelli

Published Jun 17, 2019• 75 citations
Publisher

Abstract

The twin-formulation of quantum statistical mechanics is employed to describe a new methodology for the solution of the equations of motion of the reduced density matrix in their hierarchical formulation. It is shown that the introduction of tilde operators and of their algebra in the dual space greatly simplifies the application of numerical techniques for the propagation of the density matrix. The application of tensor-train representation of a vector to solve complex quantum dynamical problems within the framework of the twin-formulation is discussed. Next, applications of the hierarchical equations of motion to a dissipative polaron model are presented showing the validity and accuracy of the new approach.

DOI
10.1063/1.5099416

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•Sep 8, 2014•12 citations
The twin-formulation of quantum statistical mechanics is employed to describe a new methodology for the solution of the equations of motion of the reduced density matrix in their hierarchical formulation. It is shown that the introduction of tilde operators and of their algebra in the dual space greatly simplifies the application of numerical techniques for the propagation of the density matrix. The application of tensor-train representation of a vector to solve complex quantum dynamical problems within the framework of the twin-formulation is discussed. Next, applications of the hierarchical equations of motion to a dissipative polaron model are presented showing the validity and accuracy of the new approach.
The non-equilibrium thermo-field dynamics formulation of the hierarchical equations of motion combined with the tensor-train representation of the density matrix is discussed, and a new numerical integration scheme is introduced. The numerical methodology is based on an adaptive low-rank Galerkin reduction scheme and can preserve linear invariants (such as the trace of the density matrix). The method is applied to the study of the charge transfer dynamics in model pentacene molecular aggregates. The combined effect of a discrete set of molecular vibrational modes and a thermal bath is investigated, paying special attention to the coherent-incoherent transition of the charge transport. The new computational framework is shown to be a very promising methodology for the study of the quantum dynamics of complex molecular systems in the condensed phase.
We extend the twin-space formulation of the hierarchical equations of motion approach in combination with the matrix product state representation [R. Borrelli, J. Chem. Phys. 150, 234102 (2019)] to nonequilibrium scenarios where the open quantum system is coupled to a hybrid fermionic and bosonic environment. The key ideas used in the extension are a reformulation of the hierarchical equations of motion for the auxiliary density matrices into a time-dependent Schrödinger-like equation for an augmented multi-dimensional wave function as well as a tensor decomposition into a product of low-rank matrices. The new approach facilitates accurate simulations of non-equilibrium quantum dynamics in larger and more complex open quantum systems. The performance of the method is demonstrated for a model of a molecular junction exhibiting current-induced mode-selective vibrational excitation.
We develop new methods to efficiently propagate the hierarchical equations of motion (HEOM) by using the Tucker and hierarchical Tucker (HT) tensors to represent the reduced density operator and auxiliary density operators. We first show that by employing the split operator method, the specific structure of the HEOM allows a simple propagation scheme using the Tucker tensor. When the number of effective modes in the HEOM increases and the Tucker representation becomes intractable, the split operator method is extended to the binary tree structure of the HT representation. It is found that to update the binary tree nodes related to a specific effective mode, we only need to propagate a short matrix product state constructed from these nodes. Numerical results show that by further employing the mode combination technique commonly used in the multi-configuration time-dependent Hartree approaches, the binary tree representation can be applied to study excitation energy transfer dynamics in a fairly large system including over 104 effective modes. The new methods may thus provide a promising tool in simulating quantum dynamics in condensed phases.
Hierarchical Equations of Motion (HEOM) in the Tensor-Train (TT) representation is applied to study the charge-transfer dynamics in organic semiconductors (OSCs). The theoretical formulation as well as the basic computational aspects of HEOM-TT are discussed in detail. Charge transfer in OSCs is modeled using dissipative polaronic models that incorporate the effects of both high- and low-frequency molecular vibrations, and it is simulated in a fully quantum and nonperturbative manner, which has not been studied intensively. The capability of treating complex electron-vibrational systems is examined by analyzing and comparing the numerical behavior of the time-dependent variational approach and the time-Alternating Minimal Energy methods and by calculating the current autocorrelation function and diffusivity across various models. Our results indicate that the HEOM-TT framework offers a robust tool for the detailed analysis of complex polaronic systems, suggesting its potential for broader applications.
(CPS) has recently been developed to study nonadiabatic dynamics in gas-phase and condensed-phase molecular systems. Although the CPS formulation is exact for describing the discrete (electronic/vibrational/spin) state degrees of freedom (DOFs), when system-bath models in condensed phase are studied, previous works often employ the approximation by discretizing environmental bath DOFs. In this paper, we develop an exact trajectory-based phase space approach by adopting the twin-space (TS) formulation of quantum statistical mechanics, in which the density operator of the reduced system is transformed to the wave function of an expanded system with twice the DOFs. The classical mapping model (CMM) is then used to map the Hamiltonian of the expanded system to its equivalent classical counterpart on CPS. To demonstrate the applicability of the TS-CMM approach, we compare simulated population dynamics and nonlinear spectra for a few benchmark condensed phase system-bath models with those obtained from the hierarchical equations of motion method, which shows that our approach yields accurate dynamics of open quantum systems.
Quantification of stochastic or quantum systems by a joint probability density or wave function is a notoriously difficult computational problem, since the solution depends on all possible states (or realizations) of the system. Due to this combinatorial flavor, even a system containing as few as ten particles may yield as many as 101010^{10}1010 discretized states. None of even modern supercomputers are capable to cope with this curse of dimensionality straightforwardly, when the amount of quantum particles, for example, grows up to more or less interesting order of hundreds. A traditional approach for a long time was to avoid models formulated in terms of probabilistic functions, and simulate particular system realizations in a randomized process. Since different times in different communities, data-sparse methods came into play. Generally, they aim to define all data points indirectly, by a map from a low amount of representers, and recast all operations (e.g. linear system solution) from the initial data to the effective parameters. The most advanced techniques can be applied (at least, tried) to any given array, and do not rely explicitly on its origin. The current work contributes further progress to this area in the particular direction: tensor product methods for separation of variables. The separation of variables has a long history, and is based on the following elementary concept: a function of many variables may be expanded as a product of univariate functions. On the discrete level, a function is encoded by an array of its values, or a tensor. Therefore, instead of a huge initial array, the separation of variables allows to work with univariate factors with much less efforts. The dissertation contains a short overview of existing tensor representations: canonical PARAFAC, Hierarchical Tucker, Tensor Train (TT) formats, as well as the artificial tensorisation, resulting in the Quantized Tensor Train (QTT) approximation method. The contribution of the dissertation consists in both theoretical constructions and practical numerical algorithms for high-dimensional models, illustrated on the examples of the Fokker-Planck and the chemical master equations. Both arise from stochastic dynamical processes in multiconfigurational systems, and govern the evolution of the probability function in time. A special focus is put on time propagation schemes and their properties related to tensor product methods. We show that these applications yield large-scale systems of linear equations, and prove analytical separable representations of the involved functions and operators. We propose a new combined tensor format (QTT-Tucker), which descends from the TT format (hence TT algorithms may be generalized smoothly), but provides complexity reduction by an order of magnitude. We develop a robust iterative solution algorithm, constituting most advantageous properties of the classical iterative methods from numerical analysis and alternating density matrix renormalization group (DMRG) techniques from quantum physics. Numerical experiments confirm that the new method is preferable to DMRG algorithms. It is as fast as the simplest alternating schemes, but as reliable and accurate as the Krylov methods in linear algebra.