arXiv subjects

Alex Chin

Publications and source records attributed to Alex Chin.

13 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

A comparison of different master equations for driven-dissipative dynamics in composite quantum systems: Dispersive readout in structured electromagnetic environments

Driven-dissipative qubit-resonator dynamics, which are the basis of most dispersive superconducting qubit measurement schemes, are often modeled with Lindblad master equations built from subsystem local jump operators, even when the qubit and resonator are appreciably hybridized. In this work we revisit this setting using a microscopic Bloch-Redfield approach, where dissipation is constructed in the eigenbasis of the coupled qubit-resonator Hamiltonian with a complete, frequency dependent, open system description of the transmission line environment. Here, we show that the Lindblad and Bloch-Redfield decay rates can be quantitatively different in the absence of driving, while in the driven case we demonstrate that the time-independent Redfield dissipator and its time-dependent generalization can show qualitatively different behaviors as a function of driving strength. Finally, we investigate the effects of driving in structured spectral densities, recovering the suppression of measurement-induced relaxation in the presence of a so called Purcell filter.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2024

Towards robust detection of entangled two-photon absorption

Over the last 50 years entangled photon pairs have received attention for use in lowering the flux in two-photon absorption imaging and spectroscopy. Despite this, evidence for entangled two-photon absorption (ETPA) effects remain highly debated, especially at low-fluxes. Here, we structure the transverse spatial correlations of entangled photon pairs to evidence signs of ETPA at room-temperature in organic and inorganic chromophores, in the low-flux regime. We demonstrate our scheme to be robust to common artifacts that have previously hampered detection of ETPA such as linear absorption and background fluorescence, and show that ETPA scales with transverse correlation area and chromophore two-photon cross-sections. Our results present a step towards verifying ETPA and experimentally exploring entangled light-matter interactions.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2024

Data-Driven Switchback Experiments: Theoretical Tradeoffs and Empirical Bayes Designs

We study the design and analysis of switchback experiments conducted on a single aggregate unit. The design problem is to partition the continuous time space into intervals and switch treatments between intervals, in order to minimize the estimation error of the treatment effect. We show that the estimation error depends on four factors: carryover effects, periodicity, serially correlated outcomes, and impacts from simultaneous experiments. We derive a rigorous bias-variance decomposition and show the tradeoffs of the estimation error from these factors. The decomposition provides three new insights in choosing a design: First, balancing the periodicity between treated and control intervals reduces the variance; second, switching less frequently reduces the bias from carryover effects while increasing the variance from correlated outcomes, and vice versa; third, randomizing interval start and end points reduces both bias and variance from simultaneous experiments. Combining these insights, we propose a new empirical Bayes design approach. This approach uses prior data and experiments for designing future experiments. We illustrate this approach using real data from a ride-sharing platform, yielding a design that reduces MSE by 33% compared to the status quo design used on the platform.

stat.ME↗

arXiv2023

Survey of the Hierarchical Equations of Motion in Tensor-Train format for non-Markovian quantum dynamics

This work is a pedagogical survey about the hierarchical equations of motion and their implementation with the tensor-train format. These equations are a great standard in non-perturbative non-Markovian open quantum systems. They are exact for harmonic baths in the limit of relevant truncation of the hierarchy. We recall the link with the perturbative second order time convolution equations also known as the Bloch-Redfield equations. Some theoretical tools characterizing non-Markovian dynamics such as the non- Markovianity measures or the dynamical map are also briefly discussed in the context of HEOM simulations. The main points of the tensor-train expansion are illustrated in an example with a qubit interacting with a bath described by a Lorentzian spectral density. Finally, we give three illustrative applications in which the system-bath coupling operator is similar to that of the analytical treatment. The first example revisits a model in which population-to-coherence transfer via the bath creates a long-lasting coherence between two states. The second one is devoted to the computation of stationary absorption and emission spectra. We illustrate the link between the spectral density and the Stokes shift in situations with and without nonadiabatic interaction. Finally, we simulate an excitation transfer when the spectral density is discretized by undamped modes to illustrate a situation in which the TT formulation is more efficient than the standard one.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2023

A Unified Representation Framework for Rideshare Marketplace Equilibrium and Efficiency

Ridesharing platforms are a type of two-sided marketplace where ``supply-demand balance'' is critical for market efficiency and yet is complex to define and analyze. We present a unified analytical framework based on the graph-based equilibrium metric (GEM) for quantifying the supply-demand spatiotemporal state and efficiency of a ridesharing marketplace. GEM was developed as a generalized Wasserstein distance between the supply and demand distributions in a ridesharing market and has been used as an evaluation metric for algorithms expected to improve supply-demand alignment. Building upon GEM, we develop SD-GEM, a dual-perspective (supply- and demand-side) representation of rideshare market equilibrium. We show that there are often disparities between the two views and examine how this dual-view leads to the notion of market efficiency, in which we propose novel statistical tests for capturing improvement and explaining the underlying driving factors.

econ.GN↗

arXiv2021

Unveiling non-Markovian spacetime signalling in open quantum systems with long-range tensor network dynamics

Nanoscale devices - either biological or artificial - operate in a regime where the usual assumptions of a structureless, Markovian, bath do not hold. Being able to predict and study the dynamics of such systems is crucial and is usually done by tracing out the bath degrees of freedom, which implies losing information about the environment. To go beyond these approaches we use a numerically exact method relying on a Matrix Product State representation of the quantum state of a system and its environment to keep track of the bath explicitly. This method is applied to a specific example of interaction that depends on the spatial structure of the system. The result is that we predict a non-Markovian dynamics where long-range couplings induce correlations into the environment. The environment dynamics can be naturally extracted from our method and shine a light on long time feedback effects that are responsible for the observed non-Markovian recurrences in the eigen-populations of the system.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2018

Evaluating stochastic seeding strategies in networks

When trying to maximize the adoption of a behavior in a population connected by a social network, it is common to strategize about where in the network to seed the behavior, often with an element of randomness. Selecting seeds uniformly at random is a basic but compelling strategy in that it distributes seeds broadly throughout the network. A more sophisticated stochastic strategy, one-hop targeting, is to select random network neighbors of random individuals; this exploits a version of the friendship paradox, whereby the friend of a random individual is expected to have more friends than a random individual, with the hope that seeding a behavior at more connected individuals leads to more adoption. Many seeding strategies have been proposed, but empirical evaluations have demanded large field experiments designed specifically for this purpose and have yielded relatively imprecise comparisons of strategies. Here we show how stochastic seeding strategies can be evaluated more efficiently in such experiments, how they can be evaluated "off-policy" using existing data arising from experiments designed for other purposes, and how to design more efficient experiments. In particular, we consider contrasts between stochastic seeding strategies and analyze nonparametric estimators adapted from policy evaluation and importance sampling. We use simulations on real networks to show that the proposed estimators and designs can increase precision while yielding valid inference. We then apply our proposed estimators to two field experiments, one that assigned households to an intensive marketing intervention and one that assigned students to an anti-bullying intervention.

stat.ME↗

arXiv2018

Regression adjustments for estimating the global treatment effect in experiments with interference

Standard estimators of the global average treatment effect can be biased in the presence of interference. This paper proposes regression adjustment estimators for removing bias due to interference in Bernoulli randomized experiments. We use a fitted model to predict the counterfactual outcomes of global control and global treatment. Our work differs from standard regression adjustments in that the adjustment variables are constructed from functions of the treatment assignment vector, and that we allow the researcher to use a collection of any functions correlated with the response, turning the problem of detecting interference into a feature engineering problem. We characterize the distribution of the proposed estimator in a linear model setting and connect the results to the standard theory of regression adjustments under SUTVA. We then propose an estimator that allows for flexible machine learning estimators to be used for fitting a nonlinear interference functional form. We propose conducting statistical inference via bootstrap and resampling methods, which allow us to sidestep the complicated dependences implied by interference and instead rely on empirical covariance structures. Such variance estimation relies on an exogeneity assumption akin to the standard unconfoundedness assumption invoked in observational studies. In simulation experiments, our methods are better at debiasing estimates than existing inverse propensity weighted estimators based on neighborhood exposure modeling. We use our method to reanalyze an experiment concerning weather insurance adoption conducted on a collection of villages in rural China.

stat.ME↗

arXiv2018

Optimizing co-operative multi-environment dynamics in a dark-state-enhanced photosynthetic heat engine

We analyze the role of coherent, non-perturbative system-bath interactions in a photosynthetic heat engine. Using the reaction-coordinate formalism to describe the vibrational phonon-environment in the engine, we analyze the efficiency around an optimal parameter regime predicted in earlier works. We show that, in the limit of high-temperature photon irradiation, the phonon-assisted population transfer between bright and dark states is suppressed due to dephasing from the photon environment, even in the Markov limit where we expect the influence of each bath to have an independent and additive affect on the dynamics. Manipulating the phonon bath properties via its spectral density enables us to identify both optimal low- and high-frequency regimes where the suppression can be removed. This suppression of transfer and its removal suggests that it is important to consider carefully the non-perturbative and cooperative effects of system-bath environments in designing artificial photosynthetic systems, and also that manipulating inter-environmental interactions could provide a new multidimensional "lever" by which to optimize photocells and other types of quantum device.

physics.chem-ph↗

arXiv2018

Central limit theorems via Stein's method for randomized experiments under interference

We study conditions under which treatment effect estimators constructed under the no-interference assumption in randomized experiments are asymptotically normal in the presence of interference. We prove that the standard Horvitz-Thompson estimator is asymptotically normal under a restricted interference condition characterized by limiting the degree of the dependency graph. The amount of interference is allowed to grow with the population size. We then provide a central limit theorem for the difference-in-means estimator that can handle interference that exists between all pairs of units, provided most of the interference is captured by a restricted-degree dependency graph. The asymptotic variance admits a decomposition into two terms: (a) the variance that is expected under no-interference and (b) the additional variance contributed by interference. We propose a conservative variance estimator based on this variance decomposition. The results arise as an application of Stein's method. For practitioners, our results show that standard estimators continue to exhibit normality in large sample sizes and that inference can be made robust to mild forms of interference.

math.ST↗

arXiv2017

Uncovering nonperturbative dynamics of the biased sub-Ohmic spin-boson model with variational Matrix Product States

We study the dynamics of the biased sub-Ohmic spin-boson model by means of a time-dependent variational matrix product state (TDVMPS) algorithm. The evolution of both the system and the environment is obtained in the weak- and the strong-coupling regimes, respectively characterized by damped spin oscillations and by a nonequilibrium process where the spin freezes near its initial state, which are explicitly shown to arise from a variety of reactive environmental quantum dynamics. We also explore the rich phenomenology of the intermediate-coupling case, a nonperturbative regime where the system shows a complex dynamical behavior, combining features of both the weakly and the strongly coupled case in a sequential, time-retarded fashion. Our work demonstrates the potential of TDVMPS methods for exploring otherwise elusive, nonperturbative regimes of complex open quantum systems, and points to the possibilities of exploiting the qualitative, real-time modification of quantum properties induced by nonequilibrium bath dynamics in ultrafast transient processes.

cond-mat.mes-hall↗

arXiv2013

Unveiling environmental entanglement in strongly dissipative qubits

The coupling of a qubit to a macroscopic reservoir plays a fundamental role in understanding the complex transition from the quantum to the classical world. Considering a harmonic environment, we use both intuitive arguments and numerical many-body quantum tomography to study the structure of the complete wavefunction arising in the strong-coupling regime, reached for intense qubit-environment interaction. The resulting strongly-correlated many-body ground state is built from quantum superpositions of adiabatic (polaron-like) and non-adiabatic (antipolaron-like) contributions from the bath of quantum oscillators. The emerging Schr\"odinger cat environmental wavefunctions can be described quantitatively via simple variational coherent states. In contrast to qubit-environment entanglement, we show that non-classicality and entanglement among the modes in the reservoir are crucial for the stabilization of qubit superpositions in regimes where standard theories predict an effectively classical spin.

cond-mat.mes-hall↗

arXiv2005

Coherent-incoherent transition in the sub-Ohmic spin-boson model

We study the spin-boson model with a sub-Ohmic bath using a variational method. The transition from coherent dynamics to incoherent tunneling is found to be abrupt as a function of the coupling strength $α$ and to exist for any power $0 < s< 1$, where the bath coupling is described by $J(ω) \sim αω^{s}$. We find non-monotonic temperature dependence of the two-level gap $\tilde{K}$ and a re-entrance regime close to the transition due to non-adiabatic low-frequency bath modes. Differences between thermodynamic and dynamic conditions for the transition as well as the limitations of the simplified bath description are discussed.

cond-mat.mes-hall↗