Improved Dyson series expansion for steady-state quantum transport beyond the weak coupling limit - divergences and resolution

TL;DR

This paper develops an improved Dyson series expansion method for calculating steady-state quantum transport in nonlinear systems, resolving divergence issues and enabling higher-order perturbative calculations beyond the weak coupling limit.

Contribution

It introduces a unique initial condition choice to eliminate divergences in the Dyson series, allowing accurate steady-state current calculations up to fourth-order in system-bath coupling.

Findings

Divergences in truncated Dyson series are resolved with a specific initial condition.

Steady-state currents are accurately computed up to fourth-order in system-bath coupling.

The method is validated against exact Green's function calculations and applied to nonlinear models.

Abstract

We present a general theory to calculate the steady-state heat and electronic currents for nonlinear systems using a perturbative expansion in the system-bath coupling. We explicitly demonstrate that using the truncated Dyson-series leads to divergences in the steady-state limit, thus making it impossible to be used for actual applications. In order to resolve the divergences we propose a unique choice of initial-condition for the reduced density matrix, which removes the divergences at each order. Our approach not only allows us to use the truncated Dyson-series, with a reasonable choice of initial condition, but also gives the expected result that the steady-state solutions should be independent of initial preparations. Using our improved Dyson series we evaluate the heat and electronic currents upto fourth-order in system-bath coupling, a considerable improvement over the standard quantum master equation techniques. We then numerically corroborate our theory for archetypal settings of linear systems using the exact nonequilibrium Green's function approach. Lastly, to demonstrate the advantage of our approach we deal with the nonlinear spin-boson model to evaluate heat current upto fourth-order and find signatures of cotunnelling process.