Speeding up thermalisation via open quantum system variational optimisation

• Published in: The European physical journal. ST, Special topics Vol. 227; no. 3-4; pp. 203 - 216
• Main Authors: Suri, Nishchay, Binder, Felix C., Muralidharan, Bhaskaran, Vinjanampathy, Sai
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Berlin/Heidelberg Springer Berlin Heidelberg 01-09-2018; Springer Nature B.V
• Subjects: Atomic; Classical and Continuum Physics; Condensed Matter Physics; Control systems; Damping; Dynamics and Applications; Evolutionary algorithms; Materials Science; Measurement Science and Instrumentation; Molecular; Optical and Plasma Physics; Optimization; Physics; Physics and Astronomy; Quantum computing; Quantum Systems In and Out of Equilibrium - Fundamentals; Quantum theory; Qubits (quantum computing); Regular Article; Variational principles
• ISSN: 1951-6355; 1951-6401
• DOI: 10.1140/epjst/e2018-00125-6

Optimising open quantum system evolution is an important step on the way to achieving quantum computing and quantum thermodynamic tasks. In this article, we approach optimisation via variational principles and derive an open quantum system variational algorithm explicitly for Lindblad evolution in Liouville space. As an example of such control over open system evolution, we control the thermalisation of a qubit attached to a thermal Lindbladian bath with a damping rate
γ
. Since thermalisation is an asymptotic process and the variational algorithm we consider is for fixed time, we present a way to discuss the potential speedup of thermalisation that can be expected from such variational algorithms.