Environmental dynamics, correlations, and the emergence of noncanonical equilibrium states in open quantum systems

By Jake Iles-Smith, Neill Lambert, A. Nazir. 2013

175 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Quantum systems are invariably open, evolving under surrounding influences rather than in isolation. Standard open quantum system methods eliminate all information on the environmental state to yield a tractable description of the system dynamics. By incorporating a collective coordinate of the environment into the system Hamiltonian, we circumvent this limitation. Our theory provides straightforward access to important environmental properties that would otherwise be obscured, allowing us to quantify the evolving system-environment correlations. As a direct result, we show that the generation of robust system-environment correlations that persist into equilibrium (heralded also by the emergence of non-Gaussian environmental states) renders the canonical system steady state almost always incorrect. The resulting equilibrium states deviate markedly from those predicted by standard perturbative techniques and are instead fully characterized by thermal states of the mapped system-collective coordinate Hamiltonian. We outline how noncanonical system states could be investigated experimentally to study deviations from canonical thermodynamics, with direct relevance to molecular and solid-state nanosystems.

Subfields: Artificial Intelligence, Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics, Statistical and Nonlinear Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/d235ef203c4401bf63666aee0905e50e0b3cf36d

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Citations in the corpus

Delocalized excitons in natural light-harvesting complexes (2018, methodology): “Well-known variations of QME approaches with modified definitions of system (Iles-Smith et al., 2016, 2014) or system-bath couplings (Hwang-Fu et al., 2015; Novoderezhkin and van Grondelle, 2017) have also been demonstrated to be accurate enough with appropriate corrections.”
Dynamics of non-Markovian open quantum systems (2015, background): “Moreover, such nonthermal relaxation was also explored by Iles-Smith et al. (2014) by considering a two-level system coupled to an environment with a Drude spectral density (see also Secs.”
Nonequilibrium thermodynamics in the strong coupling and non-Markovian regime based on a reaction coordinate mapping (2016, background): “If the supersystem is time independent and in contact with only one reservoir at inverse temperature β, it will relax to an equilibrium state ρ(t → ∞) ∼ e−βH′ S such that the equilibrium state of the original system is [48]”