Lindbladians with multiple steady states: theory and applications

Understand

Markovian master equations, often called Liouvillians or Lindbladians, are used to describe decay and decoherence of a quantum system induced by that system's environment.

• While a natural environment is detrimental to fragile quantum properties, an engineered environment can drive the system toward exotic phases of matter or toward subspaces protected from noise.
• These cases often require the Lindbladian to have more than one steady state, and such Lindbladians are dissipative analogues of Hamiltonians with multiple ground states.
• This thesis studies Lindbladian extensions of topics commonplace in degenerate Hamiltonian systems, providing examples and historical context along the way.