Steady States of a Single Trapped-Ion Spin Coupled to an Engineered Non-Markovian Bath

Quantum simulation of open quantum systems offers a pathway towards better understanding various non-equilibrium physics that would otherwise be challenging to study. Most open quantum systems studied are modeled as obeying the Markov approximation, where the bath into which the system dissipates information is assumed to be unaffected by the system-bath interaction. However, real baths are in general influenced by this interaction to some degree, and some systems which exist in structured non-Markovian environments can display novel behavior as a result. Here we utilize a trapped ion quantum simulator to simulate a single spin-$1/2$ driven-dissipative system with a non-Markovian dissipation channel, and experimentally compare steady-states to those from an analogous Markovian bath. We observe that a non-Markovian dissipative channel can dramatically change the steady-state even for a single qubit, to a regime inaccessible for Markovian dissipation. This demonstrates the added richness available to quantum systems in structured environments. The techniques used here are compatible with many-body extensions of the model, which can not be simulated efficiently on a classical computer in general. Our work also opens up new possibilities in quantum reservoir engineering beyond the Markovian regime.

Source: arXiv:2607.19286v1 - http://arxiv.org/abs/2607.19286v1 PDF: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2607.19286v1 Original Link: http://arxiv.org/abs/2607.19286v1