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Symmetry

Entanglement and Symmetry Structure of N(= 3) Quantum Oscillators with Disparate Coupling Strengths in a Common Quantum Field Bath

Jen-Tsung Hsiang, B. L. Hu

Published Nov 14, 2023• 0 citations
Publisher

Abstract

In this paper, we study the entanglement structure of a system of N quantum oscillators with distinctive coupling strengths, all linearly coupled to a common massless scalar quantum field. This study is helpful in characterizing the notion of an entanglement domain and its symmetry features, which is useful for understanding the interplay between different levels of structure in many-body quantum systems. The effect of the quantum field on the system is derived via the influence functional and the correlation functions are obtained from the solutions of the evolutionary operator of the reduced density matrix. They are then used to construct the covariance matrix, which forms the basis for our analysis of the structure of quantum entanglement in this open system. To make the physical features explicit, we consider a system of three quantum coupled oscillators placed at the vertices of an equilateral triangle with disparate pairwise couplings. We analyze the entanglement between one oscillator and the other two with equal (symmetric) and unequal (asymmetric) coupling strengths. As a physical illustration, we apply the results for these two different configurations to address some basic issues in macroscopic quantum phenomena from the quantum entanglement perspective.

DOI
10.3390/sym15112064

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Entanglement Structure of an Open System of NNN Quantum Oscillators: II. Strong Disparate Couplings N=3
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The possibility of maintaining entanglement in a quantum system at finite, even high, temperatures – the so-called ‘hot entanglement’ – has obvious practical interest, but also requires closer theoretical scrutiny. Since quantum entanglement in a system evolves in time and is continuously subjected to environmental degradation, a nonequilibrium description by way of open quantum systems is called for. To identify the key issues and the contributing factors that may permit ‘hot entanglement’ to exist, or the lack thereof, we carry out a model study of two spatially-separated, coupled oscillators in a shared bath depicted by a finite-temperature scalar field . From the Langevin equations we derived for the normal modes and the entanglement measure constructed from the covariance matrix we examine the interplay between direct coupling, field-induced interaction and finite separation on the structure of late-time entanglement. We show that the coupling between oscillators plays a crucial role in sustaining entanglement at intermediate temperatures and over finite separations. In contrast, the field-induced interaction between the oscillators which is a non-Markovian effect becomes very ineffective at high temperature. We determine the critical temperature above which entanglement disappears to be bounded in the leading order by the inverse frequency of the center-of-mass mode of the reduced oscillator system, a result not unexpected, which rules out hot entanglement in such settings.
Multi-mode entanglement is investigated in a system composed of N coupled identical harmonic oscillators interacting with a common environment. We treat the problem generally by working with the Hamiltonian without the rotating-wave approximation and by considering the environment as a non-Markovian reservoir to the oscillators. We invoke an N -mode unitary transformation of the position and momentum operators and find that in the transformed basis the system is represented by a set of independent harmonic oscillators with only one of them coupled to the environment. Working in the Wigner representation of the density operator, we find that the covariance matrix has a block diagonal form that can be expressed in terms of multiples of 3 × 3 and 4 × 4 matrices. This simple property allows us to treat the problem to some extent analytically. We illustrate the advantage of working in the transformed basis using a simple example of three harmonic oscillators and find that the entanglement can persist for long times due to the presence of constants of motion for the covariance matrix elements. We find that, in contrast to what one would expect, a strong damping of the oscillators leads to a better stationary entanglement than in the case of a weak damping.
We solve the model of N quantum Brownian oscillators linearly coupled to an environment of quantum oscillators at finite temperature, with no extra assumptions about the structure of the system-environment coupling. Using a compact phase-space formalism, we give a rather quick and direct derivation of the master equation and its solutions for general spectral functions and arbitrary temperatures. Since our framework is intrinsically nonperturbative, we are able to analyze the entanglement dynamics of two oscillators coupled to a common scalar field in previously unexplored regimes, such as off resonance and strong coupling.