Strong coupling effects in quantum thermal transport with the reaction coordinate method

Abstract: We present a semi-analytical approach for studying quantum thermal energy transport beyond the weak system-bath coupling regime. Our treatment, which results in a renormalized, effective Hamiltonian model is based on the reaction coordinate method. In our technique, applied to the nonequilibrium spin-boson model, a collective coordinate is extracted from each environment and added into the system to construct an enlarged system. After performing additional Hamiltonian's truncation and transformation, we attain an effective two-level system with renormalized parameters, which is weakly coupled to its environments, thus can be simulated using a perturbative Markovian quantum master equation approach. We compare the heat current characteristics in our method to other techniques, and demonstrate that we properly capture strong system-bath signatures such as the turnover behavior of the heat current as a function of system-bath coupling strength. We further investigate the thermal diode effect and demonstrate that strong couplings moderately improve the rectification ratio relative to the weak coupling limit. The effective Hamiltonian method that we developed here offers fundamental insight into the strong coupling behavior, and is computationally economic. Applications of the method towards studying quantum thermal machines are anticipated.