Speaker: Beatriz Olmos, University of Nottingham.
Title: Relaxation of interacting quantum many-body systems under purely dissipative
dynamics
Wednesday, May 28th 2014, 4:30pm
MIT, Chemistry Department, 6-233
Abstract:
We study the relaxation dynamics of quantum interacting many-body systems that undergo
purely dissipative dynamics but with non-classical jump operators that can establish
quantum coherence. To gain a general understanding of the difference between the resulting
dynamics with respect to that of classical rate equations we introduce a class of
interacting quantum spin systems inspired by classical kinetically constrained models,
which are widely used in the context of glass physics. The adequate choice of the jump
operators here ensures that the values of diagonal observables such as the excitation
density coincide in equilibrium with the classical ones, while the complex relaxation
dynamics is a result of the intricate interplay between the non-classical jumps and the
non-Hermitian time-evolution in the periods between them. Moreover, we show that the
relaxation time of the coherences in these systems can be orders of magnitude longer than
the one of the diagonal observables. Finally, we discuss the dynamics of strongly
interacting Rydberg atoms under electromagnetically induced transparency (EIT) conditions.
We show that this physical system --- which is currently under intensive study --- is
indeed in some limit described by a purely dissipative dynamics with non-classical jump
operators. We thoroughly study the stationary state and relaxation dynamics and analyze
the limitations of the use of a classical rate equation model to capture the
non-equilibrium behavior of this system.
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