Engineered Dissipation for Thermal-State Tracking Across Quantum Criticality

Abstract:Engineering dissipation has emerged as a powerful strategy for controlling quantum many-body dynamics, complementing purely coherent control for state preparation. However, finite-time driving across a quantum critical point generates nonadiabatic excitations and coherences, and existing dissipation-engineering approaches have largely characterized how a fixed environment modifies critical dynamics rather than actively steering a system toward a prescribed thermal trajectory. Here we develop a Markovian dissipative framework for finite-time thermal-state tracking based on engineered population currents with non-negative transition rates, and apply it to the transverse-field Ising model driven across its quantum critical point. Compared with unitary dynamics and a natural thermal bath, the engineered dynamics strongly suppresses thermal excitation deviations and provides additional control over coherence damping through a free common current $Q_k$, while exhibiting a substantially steeper residual scaling, $\delta n_{\mathrm{ex}}^{\mathrm{th}}\sim(v/v_{\mathrm{ch}})^2$, than the Kibble--Zurek behavior recovered for unitary evolution. These results point toward engineered dissipation as a route for controlling thermal-state preparation in driven quantum critical systems.

Quantum Physics (quant-ph); Statistical Mechanics (cond-mat.stat-mech)

arXiv:2609.39084 [quant-ph]

(or arXiv:2609.39084v1 [quant-ph] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2609.39084 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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