Is there a Floquet Lindbladian?

TL;DR

This paper investigates whether open Floquet systems can be described by a Floquet Lindbladian, revealing a phase transition between Markovian and non-Markovian effective descriptions influenced by stroboscopic monitoring.

Contribution

It demonstrates the existence of parameter regimes where open Floquet systems admit a Floquet Lindbladian, and others where only a non-Markovian effective description is possible.

Findings

Existence of two distinct parameter regions for open Floquet systems.

Identification of a phase boundary influenced by stroboscopic timing.

Non-Markovian effective dynamics can reproduce the evolution where Floquet Lindbladian fails.

Abstract

The stroboscopic evolution of a time-periodically driven isolated quantum system can always be described by an effective time-independent Hamiltonian. Whether this concept can be generalized to open Floquet systems, described by a Markovian master equation with time-periodic Lindbladian generator, remains an open question. By using a two level system as a model, we explicitly show the existence of two well-defined parameter regions. In one region the stroboscopic evolution can be described by a Markovian master equation with a time-independent Floquet Lindbladian. In the other it cannot; but here the one-cycle evolution operator can be reproduced with an effective non-Markovian master equation that is homogeneous but non-local in time. Interestingly, we find that the boundary between the phases depends on when the evolution is stroboscopically monitored. This reveals the non-trivial role played by the micromotion in the dynamics of open Floquet systems.