A New Framework for Quantum Phases in Open Systems: Steady State of Imaginary-Time Lindbladian Evolution

Understand

This study delves into the concept of quantum phases in open quantum systems, examining the shortcomings of existing approaches that focus on steady states of Lindbladians and highlighting their limitations in capturing key phase transitions.

• In contrast to these methods, we introduce the concept of imaginary-time Lindbladian evolution as an alternative framework.
• This new approach defines gapped quantum phases in open systems through the spectrum properties of the imaginary-Liouville superoperator.
• We find that, in addition to all pure gapped ground states, the Gibbs state of a stabilizer Hamiltonian at any finite temperature can also be characterized by our scheme, demonstrated through explicit construction.