Non-canonical distribution and non-equilibrium transport beyond weak system-bath coupling regime: A polaron transformation approach

The concept of polaron, emerged from condense matter physics, describes the dynamical interaction of moving particle with its surrounding bosonic modes. This concept has been developed into a useful method to treat open quantum systems with a complete range of system-bath coupling strength. Especial...

Full description

Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Xu, Dazhi, Cao, Jianshu
Other Authors: Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Chemistry
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: Higher Education Press 2017
Online Access:http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/106934
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5787-6615
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7616-7809
Description
Summary:The concept of polaron, emerged from condense matter physics, describes the dynamical interaction of moving particle with its surrounding bosonic modes. This concept has been developed into a useful method to treat open quantum systems with a complete range of system-bath coupling strength. Especially, the polaron transformation approach shows its validity in the intermediate coupling regime, in which the Redfield equation or Fermi’s golden rule will fail. In the polaron frame, the equilibrium distribution carried out by perturbative expansion presents a deviation from the canonical distribution, which is beyond the usual weak coupling assumption in thermodynamics. A polaron transformed Redfield equation (PTRE) not only reproduces the dissipative quantum dynamics but also provides an accurate and efficient way to calculate the non-equilibrium steady states. Applications of the PTRE approach to problems such as exciton diffusion, heat transport and light-harvesting energy transfer are presented.