We present a numerically exact method to compute the full counting statistics of heat transfer in non-Markovian open quantum systems, which is based on the time-evolving matrix product operator (TEMPO) algorithm. This approach is applied to the paradigmatic spin-boson model in order to calculate the mean and fluctuations of the heat transferred to the environment during thermal equilibration. We show that system-reservoir correlations make a significant contribution to the heat statistics at low temperature and present a variational theory that quantitatively explains our numerical results. We also demonstrate a fluctuation-dissipation relation connecting the mean and variance of the heat distribution at high temperature. Our results reveal that system-bath interactions make a significant contribution to heat dissipation even when the dynamics of the open system is effectively Markovian. The method presented here provides a flexible and general tool to predict the fluctuations of heat transfer in open quantum systems in non-perturbative regimes.
We present a numerically exact method to compute the full counting statistics of heat transfer in non-Markovian open quantum systems, which is based on the time-evolving matrix product operator (TEMPO) algorithm. This approach is applied to the paradigmatic spin-boson model in order to calculate the mean and fluctuations of the heat transferred to the environment during thermal equilibration. We show that system-reservoir correlations make a significant contribution to the heat statistics at low temperature and present a variational theory that quantitatively explains our numerical results. We also demonstrate a fluctuation-dissipation relation connecting the mean and variance of the heat distribution at high temperature. Our results reveal that system-bath interactions make a significant contribution to heat dissipation even when the dynamics of the open system is effectively Markovian. The method presented here provides a flexible and general tool to predict the fluctuations of heat transfer in open quantum systems in non-perturbative regimes.
We present a numerically exact method to compute the full counting statistics of heat transfer in non-Markovian open quantum systems, which is based on the time-evolving matrix product operator algorithm.This approach is applied to the paradigmatic spin-boson model in order to calculate the mean and fluctuations of the heat transferred to the environment during thermal equilibration.We show that system-reservoir correlations make a significant contribution to the heat statistics at low temperature and present a variational theory that quantitatively explains our numerical results.We also demonstrate a fluctuation-dissipation relation connecting the mean and variance of the heat distribution at high temperature.Our results reveal that system-bath interactions make a significant contribution to heat transfer even when the dynamics of the open system is effectively Markovian.The method presented here provides a flexible and general tool to predict the fluctuations of heat transfer in open quantum systems in nonperturbative regimes.
Open quantum systems play an important role in developing quantum sciences, and therefore the study of corresponding numerical method is of great significance. For the open quantum systems, the quasi-adiabatic propagator path integral invented in 1990s is one of the few numerically exact methods. However, its computational complexity scales exponentially with system size and correlation length, and therefore its application is limited in practical calculation. In recent years, the study and application of tensor network have made rapid progress. Representing the path integral by tensor network makes the computational complexity increase polynomially, thus greatly improving the computational efficiency. Such a new method is called time-evolving matrix product operator. At the very beginning, the reduced density matrix is represented as a matrix product state. Then the time evolution of the system can be achieved by iteratively applying matrix product operators to the matrix product state. The iterative process is amenable to the standard matrix product states compression algorithm, which keeps the computational cost on a polynomial scale. The time-evolving matrix product operator is an efficient, numerically exact and fully non-Markovian method, which has a broad application prospect in the study of quantum open systems. For instance, it is already used in the study of the thermalization, heat statistic, heat transfer and optimal control of the quantum open systems, and conversely it can be also used to investigate the effect of the system on the environment. In addition, the TEMPO method is naturally related to the process tensor, and can be used to calculate the correlation function of the system efficiently. In this article we review this method and its applications. We give a brief introduction of the path integral formalism of Caldeira-Leggett model. According to the path integral formalism, we demonstrate the usage of quasi-adiabatic propagator path integral method. we give the basic idea of matrix product states, and we show how to recast quasi-adiabatic propagator path integral method into time-evolving matrix product operators method by employing the concept of matrix product states and matrix product operators, and give a review of its applications. In addition, we use the calculation results of physical quantities, correlation functions and heat currents in the spin-boson model to illustrate the applications of the time-evolving matrix product operator method.
Simulating the non-perturbative and non-Markovian dynamics of open quantum systems is a very challenging many body problem, due to the need to evolve both the system and its environments on an equal footing. Tensor network and matrix product states (MPS) have emerged as powerful tools for open system models, but the numerical resources required to treat finite-temperature environments grow extremely rapidly and limit their applications. In this study we use time-dependent variational evolution of MPS to explore the striking theory of Tamascelli et al. (Phys. Rev. Lett. 2019, 123, 090402.) that shows how finite-temperature open dynamics can be obtained from zero temperature, i.e., pure wave function, simulations. Using this approach, we produce a benchmark dataset for the dynamics of the Ohmic spin-boson model across a wide range of coupling strengths and temperatures, and also present a detailed analysis of the numerical costs of simulating non-equilibrium steady states, such as those emerging from the non-perturbative coupling of a qubit to baths at different temperatures. Despite ever-growing resource requirements, we find that converged non-perturbative results can be obtained, and we discuss a number of recent ideas and numerical techniques that should allow wide application of MPS to complex open quantum systems.
Heat exchanged between an open quantum system and its environment exhibits fluctuations that carry crucial signatures of the underlying dynamics. Within the well-established two-point measurement scheme, we identify a “heat operator,” whose moments with respect to the vacuum state of a thermofield-doubled Hilbert space correspond to the stochastic moments of the heat exchanged with a bath. This recasts heat statistics as a unitary time evolution problem, which we solve by combining chain-mapped reservoirs with tensor-network propagation. In a multibath setup, all total and bath-resolved heat moments then follow from a single pure state evolution. We employ this approach to compute transient and steady-state heat fluctuations in Ohmic spin-boson models in and out of equilibrium, accessing the challenging low-temperature and long memory time regimes of the environment. In the nonequilibrium case, we show a crossover in the Fano factor from super-Poissonian to nearly Poissonian statistics under strong coupling asymmetry, corresponding to thermal rectification behavior. The method applies to noninteracting (bosonic or fermionic) nonequilibrium environments with arbitrary spectral densities, offering a powerful, nonperturbative framework for understanding heat transfer in open quantum systems.
Abstract We generalize time-evolving matrix product operators method to nonequilibrium quantum transport problems. The nonequilibrium current is obtained via numerical differentiation of the generating functional which is represented as a tensor network. The approach is numerically exact and the non-Markovian effects are fully taken into account. In the transport process, a part of the heat that flows out from a bath flows into the system and other baths, and the rest is stored in the system-bath coupling part. We take the spin-boson model as a demonstration to show the details of this heat flowing and the establishment of a steady current between two baths.
The exact dynamics of a system coupled to an environment can be described by an integro-differential stochastic equation for the reduced density. The influence of the environment is incorporated through a mean field which is both stochastic and nonlocal in time and where the standard two-time correlation functions of the environment appear naturally. Since no approximation is made, the presented theory incorporates exactly dissipative and non-Markovian effects. Applications to the spin-boson model coupled to a heat bath with various coupling regimes and temperature show that the presented stochastic theory can be a valuable tool to simulate exactly the dynamics of open quantum systems. Links with the stochastic Schrödinger equation method and possible extensions to "imaginary time" propagation are discussed.