Dynamics of a small quantum system open to a bath with thermostat.

Abstract

We investigate dynamics of a small quantum system open to a bath with thermostat. We introduce another bath, called a superbath, weakly coupled with the bath to provide it with a thermostat, which has either the Lindblad or Redfield type. We treat the interaction between the system and bath via a rigorous perturbation theory. Due to the thermostat, the bath behaves dissipative and stochastic, for which the usual Born-Markov assumption is not needed. We consider a specific example of a harmonic oscillator system of interest and a photonic bath in a large container, and a superbath of the Caldeira-Legget oscillators distributed on the inner surface of the container. After taking the trace over the superbath states, we use the P representation for the total harmonic system of the system and bath. We derive the reduced time-evolution equation for the system by explicitly finding the correlation between the system and bath beyond the product state that was not obtainable in the previous theory for the system and bath isolated from environment, and marginalizing bath degrees of freedom. Remarkably, the associated dynamic equation for the system density matrix is of the same form as the Redfield master equation with different coefficients depending on thermostat used. We find the steady state does not depend on the thermostat but the time-dependent state does, which agrees with common expectation. We expect to apply our theory to general systems. Unlike the usual quantum master equations, our reduced dynamics allows investigation for time-dependent protocols, and nonequilibrium quantum stochastic dynamics will be investigated in the future.