Case study of the validity of truncation schemes of kinetic equations of motion: Few magnetic impurities in a semiconductor quantum ring

Abstract

We carry out a study on the validity and limitations of truncation schemes customarily employed to treat the quantum kinetic equations of motion of complex interacting systems. Our system of choice is a semiconductor quantum ring with one electron interacting with few magnetic impurities via a Kondo-like Hamiltonian. This system is an interesting prototype which displays the necessary complexity when suitably scaled (large number of magnetic impurities) but can also be solved exactly when few impurities are present. The complexity in this system comes from the indirect electron-mediated impurity–impurity interaction and is reflected in the Heisenberg equations of motion, which form an infinite hierarchy. For the cases of two and three magnetic impurities, we solve for the quantum dynamics of our system both exactly and following a truncation scheme developed for diluted magnetic semiconductors in the bulk. We find an excellent agreement between the two approaches when physical observables like the impurities’ spin angular momentum are computed for times that well exceed the time window of validity of perturbation theory. On the other hand, we find that within time ranges of physical interest, the truncation scheme introduces negative populations which represents a serious methodological drawback.