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Physical Review A

Exact dynamics of the spin-boson model at the Toulouse limit

Yun‐An Yan, Jiushu Shao

Published Jul 26, 2023• 4 citations
Publisher

Abstract

Starting from the stochastic Liouville equation, we obtain an integral functional equation for describing the finite-temperature dynamics of the asymmetric spin-boson model. Like the zero-temperature case, this equation displays a hierarchical structure characterizing the multiple-timescale nature of quantum dissipative dynamics. We are thereby able to establish a perturbation series and illustrate the contributions with the conventional concepts of blips and sojourns. We clarify the speciality of the Toulouse limit by presenting the analytical properties of intrablip and blip-sojourn interactions. This speciality leads to a closed-form equation for the blip, from which the exact result of the dissipative dynamics can be obtained. We also demonstrate the exact solution by summing the perturbative series. Moreover, we calculate the exact equilibrium distribution at the Toulouse limit and compare it with the Boltzmann distribution valid for weak dissipation.

DOI
10.1103/physreva.108.012218

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Starting from the stochastic Liouville equation, we obtain an integral functional equation for describing the finite-temperature dynamics of the asymmetric spin-boson model. Like the zero-temperature case, this equation displays a hierarchical structure characterizing the multiple-timescale nature of quantum dissipative dynamics. We are thereby able to establish a perturbation series and illustrate the contributions with the conventional concepts of blips and sojourns. We clarify the speciality of the Toulouse limit by presenting the analytical properties of intrablip and blip-sojourn interactions. This speciality leads to a closed-form equation for the blip, from which the exact result of the dissipative dynamics can be obtained. We also demonstrate the exact solution by summing the perturbative series. Moreover, we calculate the exact equilibrium distribution at the Toulouse limit and compare it with the Boltzmann distribution valid for weak dissipation.
A generalized approximation scheme is proposed to describe the dynamics of the spin-boson problem. Being nonperturbative in the coupling strength nor in the tunneling frequency, it gives reliable results over a wide regime of temperatures and coupling strength to the thermal environment for a large class of bath spectral densities. We use a path-integral approach and start from the exact solution for the two-level system population difference in the form of a generalized master equation (GME). Then, we approximate interblip and blip-sojourn interactions up to linear order, while retaining all intrablip correlations to find the kernels entering the GME in analytical form. Our approximation scheme, which we call weakly interacting blip approximation, fully agrees with conventional perturbative approximations in the tunneling matrix element (noninteracting-blip approximation) or in the system-bath coupling strength in the proper parameter regime.
Based on the stochastic decoupling framework and auxiliary function averaging technique, a functional integral equation for the zero-temperature population dynamics of the spin-boson model is established. This equation naturally displays the hierarchical structure of the dissipative dynamics and is amenable to nonperturbative approximations. It is shown that at strong dissipation the spin-boson model displays exponential decay with the rate decreasing from the maximum at the coherence-incoherence crossover to zero at the critical dissipation, a manifestation of quantum phase transition. Besides, the scaled time does not change in the whole regime of strong dissipation.
We study the transfer of heat in the nonequilibrium spin-boson model with an Ohmic dissipation. In the nonadiabatic limit we derive a formula for the thermal conductance based on a rate equation formalism at the level of the noninteracting blip approximation, valid for temperatures T>T(K), with T(K) as the Kondo temperature. We evaluate this expression analytically assuming either weak or strong couplings, and demonstrate that our results agree with exact relations. Far-from-equilibrium situations are further examined, showing a close correspondence to the linear response limit.
We present a novel approximation scheme to describe the influence of a harmonic bath on the dynamics of a two-level particle over almost the whole regime of temperatures and coupling to the environment, for a wide class of bath spectral densities. Starting from the exact path integral solution for the two-level system density matrix, effective intra-blip correlations are fully included, while inter-blip and blip-sojourn interactions are considered up to first order. In the proper regimes, an excellent agreement with conventional perturbative approaches and ab initio path-integral results is found.
We introduce and apply a numerically exact method for investigating the real-time dissipative dynamics of quantum impurities embedded in a macroscopic environment beyond the weak-coupling limit. We focus on the spin-boson Hamiltonian that describes a two-level system interacting with a bosonic bath of harmonic oscillators. This model is archetypal for investigating dissipation in quantum systems, and tunable experimental realizations exist in mesoscopic and cold-atom systems. It finds abundant applications in physics ranging from the study of decoherence in quantum computing and quantum optics to extended dynamical mean-field theory. Starting from the real-time Feynman-Vernon path integral, we derive an exact stochastic Schr\"odinger equation that allows us to compute the full spin density matrix and spin-spin correlation functions beyond weak coupling. We greatly extend our earlier work [P. P. Orth, A. Imambekov, and K. Le Hur, Phys. Rev. A 82, 032118 (2010)] by fleshing out the core concepts of the method and by presenting a number of interesting applications. Methodologically, we present an analogy between the dissipative dynamics of a quantum spin and that of a classical spin in a random magnetic field. This analogy is used to recover the well-known noninteracting-blip approximation in the weak-coupling limit. We explain in detail how to compute spin-spin autocorrelation functions. As interesting applications of our method, we explore the non-Markovian effects of the initial spin-bath preparation on the dynamics of the coherence ${\ensuremath{\sigma}}^{x}(t)$ and of ${\ensuremath{\sigma}}^{z}(t)$ under a Landau-Zener sweep of the bias field. We also compute to a high precision the asymptotic long-time dynamics of ${\ensuremath{\sigma}}^{z}(t)$ without bias and demonstrate the wide applicability of our approach by calculating the spin dynamics at nonzero bias and different temperatures.
Classical Brownian motion has well been investigated since the pioneering work of Einstein, which inspired mathematicians to lay the theoretical foundation of stochastic processes. A stochastic formulation for quantum dynamics of dissipative systems described by the system-plus-bath model has been developed and found many applications in chemical dynamics, spectroscopy, quantum transport, and other fields. This article provides a tutorial review of the stochastic formulation for quantum dissipative dynamics. The key idea is to decouple the interaction between the system and the bath by virtue of the Hubbard-Stratonovich transformation or Itô calculus so that the system and the bath are not directly entangled during evolution, rather they are correlated due to the complex white noises introduced. The influence of the bath on the system is thereby defined by an induced stochastic field, which leads to the stochastic Liouville equation for the system. The exact reduced density matrix can be calculated as the stochastic average in the presence of bath-induced fields. In general, the plain implementation of the stochastic formulation is only useful for short-time dynamics, but not efficient for long-time dynamics as the statistical errors go very fast. For linear and other specific systems, the stochastic Liouville equation is a good starting point to derive the master equation. For general systems with decomposable bath-induced processes, the hierarchical approach in the form of a set of deterministic equations of motion is derived based on the stochastic formulation and provides an effective means for simulating the dissipative dynamics. A combination of the stochastic simulation and the hierarchical approach is suggested to solve the zero-temperature dynamics of the spin-boson model. This scheme correctly describes the coherent-incoherent transition (Toulouse limit) at moderate dissipation and predicts a rate dynamics in the overdamped regime. Challenging problems such as the dynamical description of quantum phase transition (local- ization) and the numerical stability of the trace-conserving, nonlinear stochastic Liouville equation are outlined.