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Title: Non-Markovian dynamics of a qubit coupled to an Ising spin bath

Journal Article · · Physical Review. A
 [1];  [2];  [3];  [1]
  1. Department of Electrical Engineering, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, California 90089 (United States)
  2. Department of Physics, University of Southern California, Los Angeles 90089 (United States)
  3. Department of Chemistry, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, California 90089 (United States)

We study the analytically solvable Ising model of a single qubit system coupled to a spin bath. The purpose of this study is to analyze and elucidate the performance of Markovian and non-Markovian master equations describing the dynamics of the system qubit, in comparison to the exact solution. We find that the time-convolutionless master equation performs particularly well up to fourth order in the system-bath coupling constant, in comparison to the Nakajima-Zwanzig master equation. Markovian approaches fare poorly due to the infinite bath correlation time in this model. A recently proposed post-Markovian master equation performs comparably to the time-convolutionless master equation for a properly chosen memory kernel, and outperforms all the approximation methods considered here at long times. Our findings shed light on the applicability of master equations to the description of reduced system dynamics in the presence of spin baths.

OSTI ID:
21027961
Journal Information:
Physical Review. A, Vol. 76, Issue 5; Other Information: DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevA.76.052117; (c) 2007 The American Physical Society; Country of input: International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA); ISSN 1050-2947
Country of Publication:
United States
Language:
English