English

Engineered thermalization and cooling of quantum many-body systems

Quantum Physics 2020-06-16 v2 Statistical Mechanics

Abstract

We develop a scheme for engineering genuine thermal states in analog quantum simulation platforms by coupling local degrees of freedom to driven, dissipative ancilla pseudospins. We demonstrate the scheme in a many-body quantum spin lattice simulation setting. A Born-Markov master equation describing the dynamics of the many-body system is developed, and we show that if the ancilla energies are periodically modulated, with a carefully chosen hierarchy of timescales, one can effectively thermalize the many-body system. Through analysis of the time-dependent dynamical generator, we determine the conditions under which the true thermal state is an approximate dynamical fixed point for general system Hamiltonians. Finally, we evaluate the thermalization protocol through numerical simulation and discuss prospects for implementation on current quantum simulation hardware.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1909.02023,
  title  = {Engineered thermalization and cooling of quantum many-body systems},
  author = {Mekena Metcalf and Jonathan E. Moussa and Wibe A. de Jong and Mohan Sarovar},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1909.02023},
  year   = {2020}
}

Comments

8 pages + Appendix. Published version

R2 v1 2026-06-23T11:05:50.577Z