Open quantum system | EPFL Graph Search

In physics, an open quantum system is a quantum-mechanical system that interacts with an external quantum system, which is known as the environment or a bath. In general, these interactions significantly change the dynamics of the system and result in quantum dissipation, such that the information contained in the system is lost to its environment. Because no quantum system is completely isolated from its surroundings, it is important to develop a theoretical framework for treating these interactions in order to obtain an accurate understanding of quantum systems. Techniques developed in the context of open quantum systems have proven powerful in fields such as quantum optics, quantum measurement theory, quantum statistical mechanics, quantum information science, quantum thermodynamics, quantum cosmology, quantum biology, and semi-classical approximations. Quantum system and environment A complete description of a quantum system requires the inclusion of the environment. Co

Revealing higher-order light and matter energy exchanges using quantum trajectories in ultrastrong coupling

Fabrizio Minganti

The dynamics of open quantum systems is often modeled using master equations, which describe the expected outcome of an experiment (i.e., the average over many realizations of the same dynamics). Quantum trajectories, instead, model the outcome of ideal single experiments-the "clicks" of a perfect detector due to, e.g., spontaneous emission. The correct description of quantum jumps, which are related to random events characterizing a sudden change in the wave function of an open quantum system, is pivotal to the definition of quantum trajectories. In this article, we extend the formalism of quantum trajectories to open quantum systems with ultrastrong coupling (USC) between light and matter by properly defining jump operators in this regime. In such systems, exotic higher-order quantum-state and energy transfer can take place without conserving the total number of excitations in the system. The emitted field of such USC systems bears signatures of these higher-order processes, and significantly differs from similar processes at lower coupling strengths. Notably, the emission statistics must be taken at a single quantum trajectory level, since the signatures of these processes are washed out by the "averaging" of a master equation. We analyze the impact of the chosen unraveling (i.e., how one collects the output field of the system) for the quantum trajectories and show that these effects of the higher-order USC processes can be revealed in experiments by constructing histograms of detected quantum jumps. We illustrate these ideas by analyzing the excitation of two atoms by a single photon [Garziano et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 117, 043601 (2016)]. For example, quantum trajectories reveal that keeping track of the quantum jumps from the atoms allows one to reconstruct both the oscillations between one photon and two atoms as well as emerging Rabi oscillations between the two atoms.

AMER PHYSICAL SOC2022

Quantum Monte Carlo approach to the non-equilibrium steady state of open quantum systems

Alexandra Nagy

Many-body open quantum systems are exposed to an essentially uncontrollable environment that acts as a source of decoherence and dissipation. As the exact treatment of such models is generally unfeasible, it is favourable to formulate an approximate description by means of the dynamics of the reduced density operator of the system. When studying models with a weak coupling to a memoryless environment, the existence of such solution is granted and the reduced dynamics is governed by the Lindblad quantum master equation. In recent years, open quantum systems have evolved into a major field of studies. Focus of these studies are the characterization of emergent phenomena and dissipative phase transitions, as well as the ongoing debate about whether quantum computing schemes are still hard to simulate classically --- and thus achieve quantum supremacy --- when in presence of some degree of noise-induced decoherence. However, the challenge posed by this task lies in the complexity of the density matrix that increases exponentially with the system size, and the quest for efficient numerical methods is a research field that is still in its infancy. Here, we first develop a real-time full configuration interaction quantum Monte Carlo technique that stems from a class of methods generally known as projector Monte Carlo. The approach enables the stochastic sampling of the Lindblad time evolution of the density matrix thanks to a massively parallel algorithm, thus providing estimates of observables on the non-equilibrium steady state. We present the underlying theory and introduce an initiator technique and importance sampling to reduce statistical error. We demonstrate the efficiency of the approach by applying it to the dissipative two-dimensional XYZ spin-1/2 model on a lattice. As the importance sampling of projector approaches is often combined with variational results, we then introduce a novel method that is based on the variational Monte Carlo methods and on a neural network representation of the density matrix. Thanks to the stochastic reconfiguration scheme, the application of the variational principle is translated into the actual integration of the Lindblad quantum master equation. We test the effectiveness of the method by modeling the steady state of the dissipative two-dimensional XYZ spin-1/2 model through a dissipative phase transition, and also the real-time dynamics of the dissipative Ising model. In addition, we discuss the application of the developed methods and the open questions of the field.

EPFL2020