Steady Schrödinger cat state of a driven Ising chain

Abstract

For short-range interacting systems, no Schrödinger cat state can be stable when their environment is in thermal equilibrium. We show, by studying a chain of two-level systems with nearest-neighbour Ising interactions, that this is possible when the surroundings consists of two heat reservoirs at different temperatures, or of a heat reservoir and a monochromatic field. The asymptotic state of the considered system can be a pure superposition of mesoscopically distinct states, the all-spin-up and all-spin-down states, at low temperatures. The main feature of our model leading to this result is the fact that the Hamiltonian of the chain and the dominant part of its coupling to the environment obey the same symmetry.

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Cited by in corpus (5)

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• Steady entanglement out of thermal equilibrium
• Non equilibrium dissipation-driven steady many-body entanglement
• Geometry of local quantum dissipation and fundamental limits to local cooling
• Entanglement on macroscopic scales in a resonantly laser-excited atomic ensemble