ACE: A general-purpose non-Markovian open quantum systems simulation toolkit based on process tensors.

Non-Markovian open quantum systems represent the most general dynamics when the quantum system is coupled with a bath environment. The quantum dynamics arising from many important applications are non-Markovian. Although for special cases, such as Hamiltonian evolution and Lindblad evolution, quantum simulation algorithms have been extensively studied, efficient quantum simulations for the dynamics of non-Markovian open quantum systems remain underexplored. The most immediate obstacle for studying such systems is the lack of a universal succinct description of their dynamics. In this work, we fulfill the gap of studying such dynamics by (1) providing a succinct representation of the dynamics of non-Markovian open quantum systems with quantifiable error, and (2) developing an efficient quantum algorithm for simulating such dynamics with cost $${\mathcal {O}}(t\, \textrm{polylog}(t/\epsilon ))$$ for evolution time t and precision $$\epsilon $$ . Our derivation of the succinct representation is based on stochastic Schrödinger equations, which could lead to new alternatives to deal with open quantum systems as well.

Open quantum systems and study of decoherence are important for our fundamental understanding of quantum physical phenomena. For practical purposes, a large number of quantum protocols exist that exploit quantum resources, e.g., entanglement, which allows us to go beyond what is possible to achieve by classical means. We combine concepts from open quantum systems and quantum information science and give a proof-of-principle experimental demonstration---with teleportation---that it is possible to implement efficiently a quantum protocol via a non-Markovian open system. The results show that, at the time of implementation of the protocol, it is not necessary to have the quantum resource in the degree of freedom used for the basic protocol---as long as there exists some other degree of freedom or the environment of an open system, which contains useful resources. The experiment is based on a pair of photons, where their polarizations act as open system qubits and frequencies as their environments, while the path degree of freedom of one of the photons represents the state of Alice's qubit to be teleported to Bob's polarization qubit.

Non-Markovian dynamics arising from the strong coupling of a system to a structured environment is essential in many applications of quantum mechanics and emerging technologies. Deriving an accurate description of general quantum dynamics including memory effects is, however, a demanding task, prohibitive to standard analytical or direct numerical approaches. We present a major release of our open source software package, OQuPy (Open Quantum System in Python), which provides several recently developed numerical methods that address this challenging task. It utilizes the process tensor approach to open quantum systems (OQS) in which a single map, the process tensor, captures all possible effects of an environment on the system. The representation of the process tensor in a tensor network form allows for an exact yet highly efficient description of non-Markovian OQS (NM-OQS). The OQuPy package provides methods to (1) compute the dynamics and multi-time correlations of quantum systems coupled to single and multiple environments, (2) optimize control protocols for NM-OQS, (3) simulate interacting chains of NM-OQS, and (4) compute the mean-field dynamics of an ensemble of NM-OQS coupled to a common central system. Our aim is to provide an easily accessible and extensible tool for researchers of OQS in fields such as quantum chemistry, quantum sensing, and quantum information.

Using Liouville space and superoperator formalism we consider pure stationary states of open and dissipative quantum systems. We discuss stationary states of open quantum systems, which coincide with stationary states of closed quantum systems. Open quantum systems with pure stationary states of linear oscillator are suggested. We consider stationary states for the Lindblad equation. We discuss bifurcations of pure stationary states for open quantum systems which are quantum analogs of classical dynamical bifurcations.

We study the optimal control problem in a non-Markovian open quantum system. The quantum system of interest is coupled to its local environment, which is dissipative in nature and tends to decay the quantum system. Based on the non-Markovian master equation, we study the non-Markovian effects on the system dynamics. The non-Markovian environment has dual effects on the quantum system: the dissipation and the backaction. The dissipation effect makes the system lose of quantum features, whereas the backaction revives it. We further design quantum control laws to control the system. The optimal control principle is studied to steer to quantum state to a target state. Finally, as an example, we used the optimal control method to control the quantum decoherence.

We introduce a general numerical method to compute the dynamics and multitime correlations of chains of quantum systems, where each system may couple strongly to a structured environment. The method combines the process tensor formalism for general (possibly non-Markovian) open quantum systems with time-evolving block decimation for one-dimensional chains. It systematically reduces the numerical complexity originating from system-environment correlations before integrating them into the full many-body problem, making a wide range of applications numerically feasible. We illustrate the power of this method by studying two examples. First, we study the thermalization of individual spins of a short XYZ Heisenberg chain with strongly coupled thermal leads. Our results confirm the complete thermalization of the chain when coupled to a single bath, and they reveal distinct effective temperatures in low-, mid-, and high-frequency regimes when the chain is placed between a hot and a cold bath. Second, we study the dynamics of diffusion in a longer XY chain, when each site couples to its own bath.

The weak-coupled two-level open quantum system described by non-Markovian Time-convolution-less master equation is investigated in this paper. The cut-off frequency, coupling constant and transition frequency, which impact on the system's decay rate, coherence factor and purity, are investigated. The appropriate parameters used in system simulation experiments are determined by comparing analysis results of different values of parameters for the effects of system performance. The control laws used to transfer the system states are designed on the basis of the Lyapunov stability theorem. Numerical simulation experiments are implemented under the MATLAB environment. The features of the free evolution trajectory of the non-Markovian systems and the states transfer from a pure state to a desired pure state under the action of the proposed control laws are studied, respectively. By comparing the experimental results, the effectiveness of the proposed quantum Lyapunov control method applied to the state transfer in non-Markovian open quantum systems is verified. Meanwhile, the influences of different control parameters and cut-off frequencies on the system performance are analyzed.

We critically evaluate the most widespread assumption in the theoretical description of coherent control strategies for open quantum systems. We show that, for non-Markovian open systems dynamics, this fixed-dissipator assumption leads to a serious pitfall causing insurmountable difficulties in the effective modelling of the controlled system. We show that the only way to avoid these problems is a full microscopic description of the controlled system in presence of noise. We illustrate our findings with a paradigmatic example.

Solving non-Markovian open quantum systems with multi-channel reservoir coupling

Adiabatic elimination methods allow the reduction of the space dimension needed to describe systems whose dynamics exhibit separation of timescale. For open quantum systems, it consists in eliminating the fast part assuming it has almost instantaneously reached its steady state and obtaining an approximation of the evolution of the slow part. These methods can be applied to eliminate a linear subspace within the system Hilbert space or, alternatively, to eliminate a fast subsystem in a bipartite quantum system. In this work, we extend an adiabatic elimination method used for removing fast degrees of freedom within a system [Phys. Rev. A 101, 042102 (2020)] to eliminate a subsystem from an open bipartite quantum system. As an illustration, we apply our technique to a dispersively coupled two-qubit system and in the case of the open Rabi model.

A longstanding tool to characterize the evolution of open Markovian quantum systems is the GKSL (Gorini-Kossakowski-Sudarshan-Lindblad) master equation. However, in some cases, open quantum systems can be effectively described with non-Hermitian Hamiltonians, which have attracted great interest in the last twenty years due to a number of unconventional properties, such as the appearance of exceptional points. Here, we present a short review of these two different approaches aiming in particular to highlight their relation and illustrate different ways of connecting non-Hermitian Hamiltonian to a GKSL master equation for the full density matrix.

Open quantum systems (OQS) cannot always be described with the Markov approximation, which requires a large separation of system and environment time scales. Here, we give an overview of some of the most important techniques available to tackle the dynamics of an OQS beyond the Markov approximation. Some of these techniques, such as master equations, Heisenberg equations and stochastic methods, are based on solving the reduced OQS dynamics, while others, such as path integral Monte Carlo or chain mapping approaches, are based on solving the dynamics of the full system. We emphasize the physical interpretation and derivation of the various approaches, explore how they are connected and examine how different methods may be suitable for solving different problems.

Information scrambling refers to the phenomenon in which local quantum information in a many-body system becomes dispersed throughout the entire system under unitary evolution. It has been extensively studied in closed quantum systems, where it is quantified by operator size growth, revealing deep connections between condensed matter physics, high-energy physics, and quantum information. However, when extending the study of operator size dynamics to open quantum systems, two different definitions of operator size distributions emerge. These definitions are based on different treatments of the bath. In this work, we aim to establish a unified picture for operator size dynamics in open quantum systems, using the solvable Brownian SYK models at generic system size. In particular, we provide the conditions under which the signature of scrambling transition — discovered using one particular definition — appears in operator size dynamics under the other definition. Additionally, we extend previous studies by exploring finite-size effects that are not captured by the scramblon theory. Our results provide a refined understanding of operator size dynamics in open quantum systems.

We investigate the preparation of a target initial state for a two-level (qubit) system from a system-environment equilibrium or correlated state by an external field. The system-environment equilibrium or correlated state results from the inevitable interaction of the system with its environment. An efficient method in an extended auxiliary Liouville space is introduced to describe the dynamics of the non-Markovian open quantum system in the presence of a strong field and an initial system-environment correlation. By using the time evolutions of the population difference, the state trajectory in the Bloch sphere representation and the trace distance between two reduced system states of the open quantum system, the effect of initial system-environment correlations on the preparation of a system state is studied. We introduce an upper bound and a lower bound for the trace distance within our perturbation formalism to describe the diverse behaviors of the dynamics of the trace distance between various correlated states after the system state preparation. These bounds that are much more computable than similar bounds in the literature give a sufficient condition and a necessary condition for the increase of the trace distance and are related to the witnesses of non-Markovianity and initial system-bath correlation.

Estimation of physical parameters is essential in almost any part of science and technology. The enhancement of performance in this task (e.g. beating the standard classical shot-noise limit) using available physical resources is a major goal in metrology. Quantum metrology in closed systems has indicated that entanglement in such systems may be a useful resource. However, whether in open quantum systems such enhancements may still show up is not yet fully understood. Here, we consider a dissipative (open) quantum system of identical particles in which a parameter of the open dynamics itself is to be estimated. We employ a recently developed dissipative quantum metrology framework, and investigate whether the entanglement produced in the course of the dissipative dynamics may help the estimation task. Specifically, we show that, even in a Markovian dynamics in which states become less distinguishable in time, at small enough times the entanglement generated by the dynamics may offer some advantage over the classical shot-noise limit.