The Local Coherent-State approach to system-bath quantum dynamics

Rocco Martinazzo, Irène Burghardt, Fausto Martelli +1 more

Chandrashekar Radhakrishnan, Zhiguo Lü, Jun Jing +1 more

We investigate the transient dynamics of quantum coherence for a system of two central spins in a spin-star environment by employing a numerical procedure based on a Laguerre polynomial expansion scheme. The dynamics of the total, local, and global coherence are calculated for different values of the anisotropy parameter, the system-bath interaction strengths, and temperature for different initial bipartite states. Significant dynamical features of quantum coherence are found as follows: (i) an $X$ state can only have global coherence; (ii) a state with only initial local coherence gains global coherence during the course of evolution by the induced correlations between the two-qubit system and the common bath; (iii) an incoherent state gains coherence by interacting with an external bath. We find there are two primary ways to gain coherence for an incoherent state: one is by interacting with the external quantum bath and the other is through interconversion of other quantum properties such as purity into coherence. Finally, we demonstrate that our results for the system in an infinite bath also hold qualitatively when the system is in contact with a finite bath.

V. M. Akulin

Rocco Martinazzo, Mathias Nest, Peter Saalfrank +1 more

A novel quantum method to deal with typical system-bath dynamical problems is introduced. Subsystem discrete variable representation and bath coherent-state sets are used to write down a multiconfigurational expansion of the wave function of the whole system. With the help of the Dirac-Frenkel variational principle, simple equations of motion--a kind of Schrodinger-Langevin equation for the subsystem coupled to (pseudo) classical equations for the bath--are derived. True dissipative dynamics at all times is obtained by coupling the bath to a secondary, classical Ohmic bath, which is modeled by adding a friction coefficient in the derived pseudoclassical bath equations. The resulting equations are then solved for a number of model problems, ranging from tunneling to vibrational relaxation dynamics. Comparison of the results with those of exact, multiconfiguration time-dependent Hartree calculations in systems with up to 80 bath oscillators shows that the proposed method can be very accurate and might be of help in studying realistic problems with very large baths. To this end, its linear scaling behavior with respect to the number of bath degrees of freedom is shown in practice with model calculations using tens of thousands of bath oscillators.

Sergio López-López, Mathias Nest, Rocco Martinazzo

Typical (sub)system-bath quantum dynamical problems are often investigated by means of (approximate) reduced equations of motion. Wavepacket approaches to the dynamics of the whole system have gained momentum in recent years and there is hope that properly designed approximations to the wavefunction will allow one to correctly describe the subsystem evolution. The continuous-configuration time-dependent self-consistent field (CC-TDSCF) and local coherent-state approximation (LCSA) methods, for instance, use a simple Hartree product of bath single-particle-functions for each discrete variable representation (DVR) state introduced in the Hilbert space of the subsystem. Here we focus on the above two methods and replace the DVR states with the eigenstates of the subsystem Hamiltonian, i.e., we adopt an energy-local representation for the subsystem. We find that stable and semiquantitative results are obtained for a number of dissipative problems, at the same (small) computational cost of the original methods. Furthermore, we find that both methods give very similar results, thus suggesting that coherent-states are well suited to describe (local) bath states. As a whole, present results highlight the importance of the system basis-set in the selected-multiconfiguration expansion of the wavefunction. They suggest that accurate and yet computationally cheap methods may be simply obtained from CC-TDSCF/LCSA by letting the subsystem states be variationally optimized.