Capturing non-Markovian polaron dressing with the master equation formalism.

Understanding the dynamics of open quantum systems in strong coupling and non-Markovian regimes remains a formidable theoretical challenge. One popular and well-established method of approximation in these circumstances is provided by the polaron master equation (PME). In this work, we re-evaluate and extend the validity of the PME to capture the impact of non-Markovian polaron dressing, induced by non-equilibrium open system dynamics.

Quantum Work Statistics at Strong Reservoir Coupling.

Determining the statistics of work done on a quantum system while strongly coupled to a reservoir is a formidable task, requiring the calculation of the full eigenspectrum of the combined system and reservoir. Here, we show that this issue can be circumvented by using a polaron transformation that maps the system into a new frame where weak-coupling theory can be applied. Crucially, this polaron approach reproduces the Jarzynski fluctuation theorem, thus ensuring consistency with the laws of stochastic thermodynamics.

Source Illusion Devices for Flexural Lamb Waves Using Elastic Metasurfaces.

Inspired by recent demonstrations of metasurfaces in achieving reduced versions of electromagnetic cloaks, we propose and experimentally demonstrate source illusion devices to manipulate flexural waves using metasurfaces. The approach is particularly useful for elastic waves due to the lack of form invariance in usual transformation methods. We demonstrate compact and simple-to-implement metasurfaces for shifting, transforming, and splitting a point source.