2014/09/30 by Hendrik Weimer · 2 citations
Physics and Astronomy · #quant-ph #cond-mat.stat-mech #physics.atom-ph #physics.comp-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physrevlett.114.040402
published as Phys. Rev. Lett. 114, 040402 (2015) · 6+2 pages, 4 figures
arxiv created 2015/02/19 · arxiv updated 2015/02/20
We present a novel generic framework to approximate the non-equilibrium steady states of dissipative quantum many-body systems. It is based on the variational minimization of a suitable norm of the quantum master equation describing the dynamics. We show how to apply this approach to different classes of variational quantum states and demonstrate its successful application to a dissipative extension of the Ising model, which is of importance to ongoing experiments on ultracold Rydberg atoms. Finally, we identify several advantages of the variational approach over previously employed mean-field-like methods.