Abstract

In this talk we discuss metastability in open quantum systems with Markovian dynamics. Metastability is a common phenomenon in which the system’s initial relaxation into long-lived metastable states is followed by the decay to a true stationary state at much longer times. For Markovian dynamics this separation of timescales necessarily requires a splitting in the spectrum of the dynamics generator. We show how to exploit this splitting in order to unfold the structure of the metastable manifold and the effective dynamics within [1]. We illustrate the method by exploring long-lived features of a quantum Ising chain with dissipation [2] and of a quantum glass model introduced in [3].

References: [1] K. Macieszczak, M. Guta, I. Lesanovsky, J. P. Garrahan, Phys. Rev. Lett. 116, 240404 (2016). [2] D. C. Rose, K. Macieszczak, I. Lesanovsky, J. P. Garrahan, Phys. Rev. E 94 , 052132 (2016). [3] B. Olmos, I. Lesanovsky, and J. P. Garrahan, Phys. Rev. Lett. 109, 020403 (2012).