Typical, finite baths as a means of exact simulation of open quantum systems

TL;DR

This paper proposes a finite bath approach to simulate open quantum systems, demonstrating that with appropriate properties and averaging, it can accurately reproduce Markovian dynamics and thermalization effects typically modeled by infinite baths.

Contribution

It introduces a finite bath method for simulating open quantum systems, offering an alternative to continuum baths and showing how typicality and averaging achieve accurate thermalization.

Findings

Finite baths can approximate Markovian evolution with reasonable accuracy.

Averaging over bath configurations helps recover correct steady-states.

Eigenstate thermalization underpins the thermalization process in the finite bath model.

Abstract

There is presently considerable interest in accurately simulating the evolution of open systems for which Markovian master equations fail. Examples are systems that are time-dependent and/or strongly damped. A number of elegant methods have now been devised to do this, but all use a bath consisting of a continuum of harmonic oscillators. While this bath is clearly appropriate for, e.g., systems coupled to the EM field, it is not so clear that it is a good model for generic many-body systems. Here we explore a different approach to exactly simulating open-systems: using a finite bath chosen to have certain key properties of thermalizing many-body systems. To explore the numerical resources required by this method to approximate an open system coupled to an infinite bath, we simulate a weakly damped system and compare to the evolution given by the relevant Markovian master equation. We obtain the Markovian evolution with reasonable accuracy by using an additional averaging procedure, and elucidate how the typicality of the bath generates the correct thermal steady-state via the process of "eigenstate thermalization".