Long-time relaxation of a finite spin bath linearly coupled to a qubit

Abstract

We discuss the long-time relaxation of a qubit linearly coupled to a finite bath of $N$ spins (two-level systems, TLSs), with the interaction Hamiltonian in rotating wave approximation. We focus on the regime $N\gg 1$, assuming that the qubit-bath coupling is weak, that the range of spin frequencies is sufficiently broad, and that all the spins are initialized in the ground state. Despite the model being perfectly integrable, we make two interesting observations about the effective system relaxation. First, as one would expect, the qubit relaxes exponentially towards its zero-temperature state at a well characterized rate. Second, the bath spins, even when mutually coupled, do not relax towards a thermal distribution, but rather form a Lorentzian distribution peaked at the frequency of the initially excited qubit. This behavior is captured by an analytical approximation that makes use of the property $N\gg 1$ to treat the TLS frequencies as a continuum and is confirmed by our numerical simulations.

Invited contribution to the Lindblad memorial volume, to be published in Open Systems and Information Dynamics

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Cited by in corpus (5)

• Stable many-body localization under random continuous measurements in the no-click limit
• Heat bath in a quantum circuit
• Solomon equations for qubit and two-level systems: Insights into non-Poissonian quantum jumps
• Thermalization is typical in large classical and quantum harmonic systems
• Finite-Bath Open Quantum Systems: Exact Dynamics