Accessing long timescales in the relaxation dynamics of spins coupled to a conduction-electron system using absorbing boundary conditions

The relaxation time of a classical spin interacting with a large conduction-electron system is computed for a weak magnetic field, which initially drives the spin out of equilibrium. We trace the spin and the conduction-electron dynamics on a timescale which exceeds the characteristic electronic scale that is set by the inverse nearest-neighbor hopping by more than five orders of magnitude. This is achieved with a construction of absorbing boundary conditions, which employs a generalized Lindblad master-equation approach to couple the edge sites of the conduction-electron tight-binding model to an external bath. The failure of the standard Lindblad approach to absorbing boundaries is traced back to artificial excitations initially generated due to the coupling to the bath. This can be cured by introducing Lindblad parameter matrices and by fixing those matrices to perfectly suppress initial-state artifacts as well as reflections of physical excitations propagating to the system boundaries. Numerical results are presented and discussed for generic one-dimensional models of the electronic structure.