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Physical review. B./Physical review. B

Bound on approximating non-Markovian dynamics by tensor networks in the time domain

Ilya Vilkoviskiy, Dmitry A. Abanin

Published May 9, 2024• 16 citations
Publisher

Abstract

The spin-boson (SB) model plays a central role in studies of dissipative quantum dynamics, due to bothits conceptual importance and relevance to a number of physical systems. Here, we provide rigorous bounds of the computational complexity of the SB model for the physically relevant case of a zero temperature ohmic bath. We start with the description of the bosonic bath via its Feynman-Vernon influence functional (IF), which is a tensor on the space of the trajectory of an impurity spin. By expanding the kernel of the IF via a sum of decaying exponentials, we obtain an analytical approximation of the continuous bath by a finite number of damped bosonic modes. We bound the error induced by restricting bosonic Hilbert spaces to a finite-dimensional subspace with small boson numbers, which yields an analytical form of a matrix-product state (MPS) representation of the IF. We show that the MPS bond dimension D scales polynomially in the error on physical observables as well as in the evolution time T, $D\ensuremath{\propto}{T}^{4}/{\ensuremath{\epsilon}}^{2}$. This bound indicates that the SB model can be efficiently simulated using a polynomial in time-computational resources.

DOI
10.1103/physrevb.109.205126

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The spin-boson (SB) model plays a central role in studies of dissipative quantum dynamics, due to bothits conceptual importance and relevance to a number of physical systems. Here, we provide rigorous bounds of the computational complexity of the SB model for the physically relevant case of a zero temperature ohmic bath. We start with the description of the bosonic bath via its Feynman-Vernon influence functional (IF), which is a tensor on the space of the trajectory of an impurity spin. By expanding the kernel of the IF via a sum of decaying exponentials, we obtain an analytical approximation of the continuous bath by a finite number of damped bosonic modes. We bound the error induced by restricting bosonic Hilbert spaces to a finite-dimensional subspace with small boson numbers, which yields an analytical form of a matrix-product state (MPS) representation of the IF. We show that the MPS bond dimension D scales polynomially in the error on physical observables as well as in the evolution time T, D\ensuremath∝T4/\ensuremathϵ2D\ensuremath{\propto}{T}^{4}/{\ensuremath{\epsilon}}^{2}D\ensuremath∝T4/\ensuremathϵ2. This bound indicates that the SB model can be efficiently simulated using a polynomial in time-computational resources.
Spin-boson (SB) model plays a central role in studies of dissipative quantum dynamics, both due its conceptual importance and relevance to a number of physical systems. Here we provide rigorous bounds of the computational complexity of the SB model for the physically relevant case of a zero temperature Ohmic bath. We start with the description of the bosonic bath via its Feynman-Vernon influence functional (IF), which is a tensor on the space of spin's trajectories. By expanding the kernel of the IF functional via a sum of decaying exponentials, we obtain an analytical approximation of the continuous bath by a finite number of damped bosonic modes. We bound the error induced by restricting bosonic Hilbert spaces to a finite-dimensional subspace with small boson numbers, which yields an analytical form of a matrix-product state (MPS) representation of the IF. We show that the MPS bond dimension DDD scales polynomially in the error on physical observables εεε, as well as in the evolution time TTT, D∝T4/ε2D\propto T^4/ε^2D∝T4/ε2. This bound indicates that the spin-boson model can be efficiently simulated using polynomial in time computational resources.
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.
We derive rigorous truncation-error bounds for the spin-boson model and its generalizations to arbitrary quantum systems interacting with bosonic baths. For the numerical simulation of such baths, the truncation of both the number of modes and the local Hilbert-space dimensions is necessary. We derive superexponential Lieb-Robinson-type bounds on the error when restricting the bath to finitely many modes and show how the error introduced by truncating the local Hilbert spaces may be efficiently monitored numerically. In this way we give error bounds for approximating the infinite system by a finite-dimensional one. As a consequence, numerical simulations such as the time-evolving density with orthogonal polynomials algorithm (TEDOPA) now allow for the fully certified treatment of the system-environment interaction.
Within the lowest-order Born approximation, we present an exact calculation of the time dynamics of the spin-boson model in the Ohmic regime. We observe non-Markovian effects at zero temperature that scale with the system-bath coupling strength and cause qualitative changes in the evolution of coherence at intermediate times of order of the oscillation period. These changes could significantly affect the performance of these systems as qubits. In the biased case, we find a prompt loss of coherence at these intermediate times, whose decay rate is set by $\sqrt{\ensuremath{\alpha}}$, where $\ensuremath{\alpha}$ is the coupling strength to the environment. We also explore the calculation of the next-order Born approximation: we show that, at the expense of very large computational complexity, interesting physical quantities can be rigorously computed at fourth order using computer algebra, presented completely in an accompanying MATHEMATICA file. We compute the $O(\ensuremath{\alpha})$ corrections to the long time behavior of the system density matrix; the result is identical to the reduced density matrix of the equilibrium state to the same order in $\ensuremath{\alpha}$. All these calculations indicate precision experimental tests that could confirm or refute the validity of the spin-boson model in a variety of systems.
Out-of-equilibrium fermionic quantum impurity models (QIM), describing a small interacting system coupled to a continuous fermionic bath, play an important role in condensed matter physics. Solving such models is a computationally demanding task, and a variety of computational approaches are based on finding approximate representations of the bath by a finite number of modes. In this paper, we formulate the problem of finding efficient bath representations as that of approximating a kernel of the bath's Feynman-Vernon influence functional by a sum of complex exponentials, with each term defining a fermionic pseudomode. Under mild assumptions on the analytic properties of the bath spectral density, we provide an analytic construction of pseudomodes, and prove that their number scales polylogarithmically with the maximum evolution time TTT and the approximation error $\ensuremath{\varepsilon}$. We then demonstrate that the number of pseudomodes can be significantly reduced by an interpolative matrix decomposition (ID). Furthermore, we present a complementary approach, based on constructing rational approximations of the bath's spectral density using the ``AAA'' algorithm, followed by compression with ID. The combination of two approaches yields a pseudomode count scaling as ${N}_{\text{ID}}\ensuremath{\sim}ln(T)ln(1/\ensuremath{\varepsilon})$, and the agreement between the two approaches suggests that the result is close to optimal. Finally, to relate our findings to QIM, we derive an explicit Liouvillian that describes the time evolution of the combined impurity-pseudomodes system. These results establish bounds on the computational resources required for solving out-of-equilibrium QIMs, providing an efficient starting point for tensor-network methods for QIMs.
We describe an iterative formalism to compute influence functionals that describe the general quantum dynamics of a subsystem beyond the assumption of linear coupling to a quadratic bath. We use a space-time tensor network representation of the influence functional and investigate its approximability in terms of its bond dimension and time-like entanglement in the tensor network description. We study two numerical models, the spin-boson model and a model of interacting hard-core bosons in a 1D harmonic trap. We find that the influence functional and the intermediates involved in its construction can be efficiently approximated by low bond dimension tensor networks in certain dynamical regimes, which allows the quantum dynamics to be accurately computed for longer times than with direct time evolution methods. However, as one iteratively integrates out the bath, the correlations in the influence functional can first increase before decreasing, indicating that the final compressibility of the influence functional is achieved via non-trivial cancellation.