English

Time evolution of open quantum many-body systems

Quantum Physics 2017-09-29 v3 Statistical Mechanics Atomic Physics

Abstract

We establish a generic method to analyze the time evolution of open quantum many-body systems. Our approach is based on a variational integration of the quantum master equation describing the dynamics and naturally connects to a variational principle for its nonequilibrium steady state. We successfully apply our variational method to study dissipative Rydberg gases, finding excellent quantitative agreement with small-scale simulations of the full quantum master equation. We observe that correlations related to non-Markovian behavior play a significant role during the relaxation dynamics towards the steady state. We further quantify this non-Markovianity and find it to be closely connected to an information-theoretical measure of quantum and classical correlations.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1510.01339,
  title  = {Time evolution of open quantum many-body systems},
  author = {Vincent R. Overbeck and Hendrik Weimer},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1510.01339},
  year   = {2017}
}

Comments

5+3 pages, 8 figures

R2 v1 2026-06-22T11:13:18.228Z