English

Feynman's Clock for open quantum systems

Quantum Physics 2015-06-22 v1

Abstract

We show that Feynman's Clock construction, in which the time-evolution of a closed quantum system is encoded as a ground state problem, can be extended to open quantum systems. In our formalism, the ground states of an ensemble of non-Hermitian Feynman Clock Hamiltonians yield stochastic trajectories, which unravel the evolution of a Lindblad master equation. In this way, one can use Feynman's Clock not only to simulate the evolution of a quantum system, but also it's interaction with an environment such as a heat bath or measuring apparatus. A simple numerical example of a two-level atom undergoing spontaneous emission is presented and analyzed.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1406.5631,
  title  = {Feynman's Clock for open quantum systems},
  author = {David G. Tempel and Alan Aspuru-Guzik},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1406.5631},
  year   = {2015}
}

Comments

17 pages, 6 Figures

R2 v1 2026-06-22T04:44:01.823Z