Landau-Zener transitions in the presence of harmonic noise

TL;DR

This paper investigates how off-diagonal harmonic noise affects Landau-Zener transition probabilities, revealing that noise frequency and deterministic driving can be used to control quantum state transitions, with potential applications in Bose-Einstein condensates.

Contribution

It demonstrates the significant impact of harmonic noise on Landau-Zener transitions and compares stochastic noise effects with deterministic sinusoidal driving for transition control.

Findings

Harmonic noise can substantially alter transition probabilities.

The effect depends strongly on the noise's characteristic frequency.

Deterministic sinusoidal driving can produce larger, more controlled transition changes.

Abstract

We study the influence of off-diagonal harmonic noise on transitions in a Landau-Zener model. We demonstrate that the harmonic noise can change the transition probabilities substantially and that its impact depends strongly on the characteristic frequency of the noise. In the underdamped regime of the noise process, its effect is compared with the one of a deterministic sinusoidally oscillating function. While altering the properties of the noise process allows one to engineer the transitions probabilities, driving the system with a deterministic sinusoidal function can result in larger and more controlled changes of the transition probability. This may be relevant for realistic implementations of our model with Bose-Einstein condensates in noise-driven optical lattices.