Quantum simulation of many-body effects in steady-state nonequilibrium: Electron-phonon coupling in quantum dots

We develope a method of mapping quantum nonequilibrium steady-state to an effective equilibrium system and present an algorithm to calculate electron-transport using an equilibrium technique. A systematic implementation of boundary conditions in steady-state nonequilibrium is made in the statistical operator Ŷ constructed from scattering state operators. We explicitly demonstrate the equivalence of this method to nonequilibrium Green function techniques for a noninteracting quantum dot model. In electron-phonon coupled quantum dot systems, we formulate an algorithm to construct the statistical bias operator Ŷ and perform a full many-body calculation with the quantum Monte Carlo technique. The results coherently demonstrate various transport behaviors such as phonon dephasing, I−V staircase, and phonon-assisted tunneling phenomena. This formulation makes the existing computational quantum many-body techniques applicable to quantum steady-state nonequilibrium problems, which will complement the theories based on the diagrammatic approach.