Closures of the functional expansion hierarchy in the non-Markovian quantum state diffusion approach

Open quantum dynamics theory for a complex subenvironment system with a quantum thermostat: Application to a spin heat bath

Complex environments, such as molecular matrices and biological material, play a fundamental role in many important dynamic processes in condensed phases. Because it is extremely difficult to conduct full quantum dynamics simulations on such environments due to their many degrees of freedom, here, we treat in detail the environment only around the main system of interest (the subenvironment), while the other degrees of freedom needed to maintain the equilibrium temperature are described by a simple harmonic bath, which we call a quantum thermostat. The noise generated by the subenvironment is spatially non-local and non-Gaussian and cannot be characterized by the fluctuation-dissipation theorem. We describe this model by simulating the dynamics of a two-level system (TLS) that interacts with a subenvironment consisting of a one-dimensional XXZ spin chain. The hierarchical Schrödinger equations of motion are employed to describe the quantum thermostat, allowing for time-irreversible simulations of the dynamics at arbitrary temperature. To see the effects of a quantum phase transition of the subenvironment, we investigate the decoherence and relaxation processes of the TLS at zero and finite temperatures for various values of the spin anisotropy. We observed the decoherence of the TLS at finite temperature even when the anisotropy of the XXZ model is enormous. We also found that the population-relaxation dynamics of the TLS changed in a complex manner with the change in the anisotropy and the ferromagnetic or antiferromagnetic orders of spins.

Analysis of bath motion in MM-SQC dynamics via dimensionality reduction approach: Principal component analysis

The system-plus-bath model is an important tool to understand the nonadiabatic dynamics of large molecular systems. Understanding the collective motion of a large number of bath modes is essential for revealing their key roles in the overall dynamics. Here, we applied principal component analysis (PCA) to investigate the bath motion in the basis of a large dataset generated from the symmetrical quasi-classical dynamics method based on the Meyer-Miller mapping Hamiltonian nonadiabatic dynamics for the excited-state energy transfer in the Frenkel-exciton model. The PCA method clearly elucidated that two types of bath modes, which either display strong vibronic coupling or have frequencies close to that of the electronic transition, are important to the nonadiabatic dynamics. These observations were fully consistent with the physical insights. The conclusions were based on the PCA of the trajectory data and did not involve significant pre-defined physical knowledge. The results show that the PCA approach, which is one of the simplest unsupervised machine learning dimensionality reduction methods, is a powerful one for analyzing complicated nonadiabatic dynamics in the condensed phase with many degrees of freedom.

Stochastic simulation of anharmonic dissipation. II. Harmonic bath potentials with quadratic couplings

The workhorse simulating the dissipative dynamics is mainly based on the harmonic bath potentials together with linear system-bath couplings, but a realistic bath always assumes anharmonicity. In this work, we extend the linear dissipation model to include quadratic couplings and suggest a stochastic simulation scheme for the anharmonic dissipation. We show that the non-Gaussian noises induced by the anharmonic bath can be rigorously constructed, and the resulting stochastic Liouville equation has the same form as that for the linear dissipation model. As a preliminary application, we use this stochastic method to investigate the vibration-induced symmetry breaking in two-level electronic systems and find that the characteristic function of the non-Gaussian noises determines the absorption and fluorescence spectra.

A unified stochastic formulation of dissipative quantum dynamics. I. Generalized hierarchical equations

We extend a standard stochastic theory to study open quantum systems coupled to a generic quantum environment. We exemplify the general framework by studying a two-level quantum system coupled bilinearly to the three fundamental classes of non-interacting particles: bosons, fermions, and spins. In this unified stochastic approach, the generalized stochastic Liouville equation (SLE) formally captures the exact quantum dissipations when noise variables with appropriate statistics for different bath models are applied. Anharmonic effects of a non-Gaussian bath are precisely encoded in the bath multi-time correlation functions that noise variables have to satisfy. Starting from the SLE, we devise a family of generalized hierarchical equations by averaging out the noise variables and expand bath multi-time correlation functions in a complete basis of orthonormal functions. The general hierarchical equations constitute systems of linear equations that provide numerically exact simulations of quantum dynamics. For bosonic bath models, our general hierarchical equation of motion reduces exactly to an extended version of hierarchical equation of motion which allows efficient simulation for arbitrary spectral densities and temperature regimes. Similar efficiency and flexibility can be achieved for the fermionic bath models within our formalism. The spin bath models can be simulated with two complementary approaches in the present formalism. (I) They can be viewed as an example of non-Gaussian bath models and be directly handled with the general hierarchical equation approach given their multi-time correlation functions. (II) Alternatively, each bath spin can be first mapped onto a pair of fermions and be treated as fermionic environments within the present formalism.