Lieb-Robinson Bound and Locality for General Markovian Quantum Dynamics

Understand

The Lieb-Robinson bound shows the existence of a maximum speed of signal propagation in discrete quantum mechanical systems with local interactions.

• This generalizes the concept of relativistic causality beyond field theory, and provides a powerful tool in theoretical condensed matter physics and quantum information science.
• Here, we extend the scope of this seminal result by considering general Markovian quantum evolution, where we prove that an equivalent bound holds.
• In addition, we use the generalized bound to demonstrate that correlations in the stationary state of a Markov process decay on a length-scale set by the Lieb-Robinson velocity and the system's relaxation time.