Bath-induced deviations from Gibbs statistics for strongly interacting oscillators
Abstract
The Redfield quantum master equation is widely used to study the dynamics of interacting subsystems that are weakly coupled to baths. Redfield dynamics under secular approximation preserves positivity of the reduced density operator and thermalizes the system into a Gibbs state at equilibrium. Long-time effects arising from non-secular terms are often neglected, but depending on the system spectrum and relative bath couplings, non-secular contributions are shown here to drive the system into a non-Gibbs state. For two strongly interacting quantum oscillators with independent baths at equal temperature, we analyze the microscopic origin of the deviations from Gibbs statistics. Provided that the oscillators are unequally damped by their baths, we show that steady state occupation numbers can significantly deviate from a Boltzmann distribution due to an excitation flux driven by bath-induced coherences between nearly-degenerate oscillator levels. Conditions for the recovery of thermal Gibbs statistics are discussed and experimental signatures suggested.
Related
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BibTeX
@misc{recabal2026bathinduced,
title = {{Bath-induced deviations from Gibbs statistics for strongly interacting oscillators}},
author = {Felipe Recabal and Adrian E. Rubio Lopez and Johannes Schachenmayer and Felipe Herrera},
howpublished = {HAL},
year = {2026},
month = may,
eprint = {2606.00239},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://hal.science/hal-05786045v1},
note = {CC BY 4.0},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Bath-induced deviations from Gibbs statistics for strongly interacting oscillators
AU - Felipe Recabal
AU - Adrian E. Rubio Lopez
AU - Johannes Schachenmayer
AU - Felipe Herrera
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/05/29
PB - HAL
UR - https://hal.science/hal-05786045v1
AB - The Redfield quantum master equation is widely used to study the dynamics of interacting subsystems that are weakly coupled to baths. Redfield dynamics under secular approximation preserves positivity of the reduced density operator and thermalizes the system into a Gibbs state at equilibrium. Long-time effects arising from non-secular terms are often neglected, but depending on the system spectrum and relative bath couplings, non-secular contributions are shown here to drive the system into a non-Gibbs state. For two strongly interacting quantum oscillators with independent baths at equal temperature, we analyze the microscopic origin of the deviations from Gibbs statistics. Provided that the oscillators are unequally damped by their baths, we show that steady state occupation numbers can significantly deviate from a Boltzmann distribution due to an excitation flux driven by bath-induced coherences between nearly-degenerate oscillator levels. Conditions for the recovery of thermal Gibbs statistics are discussed and experimental signatures suggested.
ER -