Publications by authors named "Andrea Smirne"

The combination of chain-mapping and tensor-network techniques provides a powerful tool for the numerically exact simulation of open quantum systems interacting with structured environments. However, these methods suffer from a quadratic scaling with the physical simulation time, and therefore, they become challenging in the presence of multiple environments. This is particularly true when fermionic environments, well-known to be highly correlated, are considered.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

We exploit the properties of chain mapping transformations of bosonic environments to identify a finite collection of modes able to capture the characteristic features, or fingerprint, of the environment. Moreover we show that the countable infinity of residual bath modes can be replaced by a universal Markovian closure, namely, a small collection of damped modes undergoing a Lindblad-type dynamics whose parametrization is independent of the spectral density under consideration. We show that the Markovian closure provides a quadratic speedup with respect to standard chain mapping techniques and makes the memory requirement independent of the simulation time, while preserving all the information on the fingerprint modes.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

We critically examine the role that correlations established between a system and fragments of its environment play in characterising the ensuing dynamics. We employ a dephasing model with different initial conditions, where the state of the initial environment represents a tunable degree of freedom that qualitatively and quantitatively affects the correlation profiles, but nevertheless results in the same reduced dynamics for the system. We apply recently developed tools for the characterisation of non-Markovianity to carefully assess the role that correlations, as quantified by the (quantum) Jensen-Shannon divergence and relative entropy, as well as changes in the environmental state, play in whether the conditions for classical objectivity within the quantum Darwinism paradigm are met.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Simple, controllable models play an important role in learning how to manipulate and control quantum resources. We focus here on quantum non-Markovianity and model the evolution of open quantum systems by quantum renewal processes. This class of quantum dynamics provides us with a phenomenological approach to characterise dynamics with a variety of non-Markovian behaviours, here described in terms of the trace distance between two reduced states.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

In the dynamics of open quantum systems, the backflow of information to the reduced system under study has been suggested as the actual physical mechanism inducing memory and thus leading to non-Markovian quantum dynamics. To this aim, the trace-distance revivals between distinct evolved system states have been shown to be subordinated to the establishment of system-environment correlations or changes in the environmental state. We show that this interpretation can be substantiated also for a class of entropic quantifiers.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Using a newly introduced connection between the local and non-local description of open quantum system dynamics, we investigate the relationship between these two characterisations in the case of quantum semi-Markov processes. This class of quantum evolutions, which is a direct generalisation of the corresponding classical concept, guarantees mathematically well-defined master equations, while accounting for a wide range of phenomena, possibly in the non-Markovian regime. In particular, we analyse the emergence of a dephasing term when moving from one type of master equation to the other, by means of several examples.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

We investigate the quench dynamics of an open quantum system involving a quantum phase transition. In the isolated case, the quench dynamics involving the phase transition exhibits a number of scaling relations with the quench rate as predicted by the celebrated Kibble-Zurek mechanism. In contact with an environment however, these scaling laws break down and one may observe an anti-Kibble-Zurek behavior: slower ramps lead to less adiabatic dynamics, increasing thus nonadiabatic effects with the quench time.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Stochastic methods with quantum jumps are often used to solve open quantum system dynamics. Moreover, they provide insight into fundamental topics, such as the role of measurements in quantum mechanics and the description of non-Markovian memory effects. However, there is no unified framework to use quantum jumps to describe open-system dynamics in any regime.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Quantum metrology protocols allow us to surpass precision limits typical to classical statistics. However, in recent years, no-go theorems have been formulated, which state that typical forms of uncorrelated noise can constrain the quantum enhancement to a constant factor and, thus, bound the error to the standard asymptotic scaling. In particular, that is the case of time-homogeneous (Lindbladian) dephasing and, more generally, all semigroup dynamics that include phase covariant terms, which commute with the system Hamiltonian.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Collapse models explain the absence of quantum superpositions at the macroscopic scale, while giving practically the same predictions as quantum mechanics for microscopic systems. The Continuous Spontaneous Localization (CSL) model is the most refined and studied among collapse models. A well-known problem of this model, and of similar ones, is the steady and unlimited increase of the energy induced by the collapse noise.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF