Expectations with Respect to the Gibbs State of the Harmonic Oscillator

Sergio A Albeverio, Raphael J. Høegh-Krohn

Sergio A Albeverio, Raphael J. Høegh-Krohn

Joonhyun Yeo, Haena Shim

An open quantum system interacting with a heat bath at a given temperature is expected to reach the mean force Gibbs (MFG) state as a steady state. The MFG state is given by tracing out the bath degrees of freedom from the equilibrium Gibbs state of the total system plus bath. When the interaction between the system and the bath is not negligible, it is different from the usual system Gibbs state obtained from the system Hamiltonian only. Using the path integral method, we present the exact MFG state for a coupled system of quantum harmonic oscillators in contact with multiple thermal baths at the same temperature. We develop a nonperturbative method to calculate the covariances with respect to the MFG state. By comparing them with those obtained from the system Gibbs state, we find that the effect of coupling to the bath decays exponentially as a function of the distance from the system-bath boundary. This is similar to the skin effect found recently for a quantum spin chain interacting with an environment. Using the exact results, we also investigate the ultrastrong coupling limit where the coupling between the system and the bath gets arbitrarily large and makes a connection with the recent result found for a general quantum system.

Vladimir N. Chernega, Vladimir I. Man’ko

Takaaki Monnai, Shohei Morodome, Kazuya Yuasa

Integrable quantum many-body systems are considered to equilibrate to generalized Gibbs ensembles (GGEs) characterized by the expectation values of integrals of motion. We study the dynamics of exactly solvable quadratic bosonic systems in the thermodynamic limit, and show a general mechanism for the relaxation to GGEs, in terms of the diagonal singularity. We show analytically and explicitly that a free bosonic system relaxes from a general (not necessarily Gaussian) initial state under certain physical conditions to a Gaussian GGE. We also show the relaxation to a Gaussian GGE in an exactly solvable coupled system, a harmonic oscillator linearly interacting with bosonic reservoirs.