Dissipation-induced first-order decoherence phase transition in a non-interacting fermionic system

Abstract

We consider a dissipative tight-binding chain. The dissipation manifests as tunneling into/out of the chain from/to a memoryless environment. The evolution of the system is described by the Lindblad equation. Already infinitesimally small dissipation along the chain induces a quantum phase transition (QPT). This is a decoherence QPT: the reduced density matrix of a subsystem (far from the ends of the chain) can be represented as the tensor product of single-site density matrices. We analyze the QPT in the thermodynamic limit by looking at the entropy and the response function in the bulk. We also explore the properties of the boundaries of the chain close to the transition point and observe that the boundaries behave as if they undergo a second-order phase transition with power-law divergence of the correlation functions and response function. Disorder is known to localize one-dimensional systems, but the coupling to the memoryless environment pushes the system back into the delocalized state even in the presence of disorder.

9 pages, 9 figures

References in corpus (10)

• Anderson Transitions
• Quantum phase transition in a far from equilibrium steady state of XY spin chain
• Super-fermion representation of the Lindblad master equation for the electron transport problem
• Solvable quantum nonequilibrium model exhibiting a phase transition and a matrix product representation
• Quantum Phase Transition in a Resonant Level Coupled to Interacting Leads
• Universal conductance of nanowires near the superconductor-metal quantum transition
• Exact large-deviation statistics for a nonequilibrium quantum spin chain
• Thermal Instability of Protected End States in a 1-D Topological Insulator
• Nonequilibrium Phase Transitions
• Decohering d-dimensional quantum resistance

Cited by in corpus (6)

• Cavity-assisted mesoscopic transport of fermions: Coherent and dissipative dynamics
• Resummation for Nonequilibrium Perturbation Theory and Application to Open Quantum Lattices
• Dissipation induced extended-localized transition
• Critical relaxation with overdamped quasiparticles in open quantum systems
• A General Strategy for Realizing Mpemba Effects in Open Quantum Systems
• Aperiodic Dissipation as a Mechanism for Steady-State Localization