Fluctuation of coherences in noisy mesoscopic quantum systems with diffusive transport

Abstract

The motivation for this thesis is to find a fluctuating hydrodynamic description of quantum coherent effects in mesoscopic quantum systems with diffusive transport properties. Coherent effects are inscribed into the coherences (two-point Green's function) on which we focus as the building blocks of such a theory. Our approach is rather mathematical and not related to concrete experiments. We study the quantum symmetric simple exclusion process (QSSEP), a potentially iconic model describing transport of noisy free fermions on a 1D lattice, which has the minimal structure to capture what we are interested in: Long-ranged coherences and diffusive transport. In mean, QSSEP reduces to the symmetric simple exclusion process (SSEP), a classical toy model that was important in the development of the macroscopic fluctuation theory, a fluctuating hydrodynamic description of diffusive transport in classical systems. Studying QSSEP we hope to make progress towards a quantum coherent extension of the macroscopic fluctuation theory. The thesis summarizes many results we have obtained about QSSEP in the last three years, such as the dynamical equation and an exact stationary solution for correlation functions of coherences at hydrodynamic scales, the distribution of entanglement in QSSEP and an argument why QSSEP might be an effective noisy description for more generic mesoscopic quantum systems. Many of these results are due to a relation between the statistical properties of coherences in QSSEP and free probability theory. We devote a whole chapter to this relation and present, as a by-product, a method to characterize the spectrum of subblocks of a large class of structured random matrices.