English

Numerical computation of the equilibrium-reduced density matrix for strongly coupled open quantum systems

Quantum Physics 2023-01-25 v3 Strongly Correlated Electrons Numerical Analysis Numerical Analysis

Abstract

We describe a numerical algorithm for approximating the equilibrium-reduced density matrix and the effective (mean force) Hamiltonian for a set of system spins coupled strongly to a set of bath spins when the total system (system+bath) is held in canonical thermal equilibrium by weak coupling with a "super-bath". Our approach is a generalization of now standard typicality algorithms for computing the quantum expectation value of observables of bare quantum systems via trace estimators and Krylov subspace methods. In particular, our algorithm makes use of the fact that the reduced system density, when the bath is measured in a given random state, tends to concentrate about the corresponding thermodynamic averaged reduced system density. Theoretical error analysis and numerical experiments are given to validate the accuracy of our algorithm. Further numerical experiments demonstrate the potential of our approach for applications including the study of quantum phase transitions and entanglement entropy for long-range interaction systems.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2204.08147,
  title  = {Numerical computation of the equilibrium-reduced density matrix for strongly coupled open quantum systems},
  author = {Tyler Chen and Yu-Chen Cheng},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2204.08147},
  year   = {2023}
}

Comments

In v2, 3 sentences were mistakenly omitted which caused a discrepancy in the numbering of the arxiv version and journal version. The current version fixes this issue

R2 v1 2026-06-24T10:50:37.412Z