2015/12/31 by Katarzyna Macieszczak, Madalin Guta, Igor Lesanovsky +1 · 3 citations
Physics and Astronomy · #cond-mat.stat-mech #quant-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physrevlett.116.240404
published as Phys. Rev. Lett. 116, 240404 (2016) · 5 pages, 2 figures, 10 pages of extended SM
arxiv created 2016/06/22 · arxiv updated 2016/06/23
By generalising concepts from classical stochastic dynamics, we establish the basis for a theory of metastability in Markovian open quantum systems. Partial relaxation into long-lived metastable states - distinct from the asymptotic stationary state - is a manifestation of a separation of timescales due to a splitting in the spectrum of the generator of the dynamics. We show here how to exploit this spectral structure to obtain a low dimensional approximation to the dynamics in terms of motion in a manifold of metastable states constructed from the low-lying eigenmatrices of the generator. We argue that the metastable manifold is in general composed of disjoint states, noiseless subsystems and decoherence-free subspaces.