Emergence of prethermal states in a driven dissipative system through cross-correlated dissipation

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that prethermal states can emerge in a driven dissipative quantum system due to cross-correlated dissipation effects, supported by theoretical modeling aligned with experimental observations.

Contribution

It introduces a novel mechanism for prethermal phase emergence in open quantum systems considering cross terms between drive and interactions.

Findings

Prethermal states observed in a dipolar two-spin system.

Theoretical model explains experimental transient dynamics.

Cross-correlated dissipation is key to prethermalization.

Abstract

Periodically driven closed quantum many-body systems are known to exhibit prethermal or quasi-steady-state dynamics. In this work, we theoretically show that such prethermal phases can appear in the dynamics of a dipolar two-spin-$1/2$ system coupled to a heat bath if the cross terms between the drive and dipolar interactions are taken into consideration. To this end, we use our recently-reported fluctuation-regulated quantum master equation [A. Chakrabarti and R. Bhattacharyya, Phys. Rev. A 97, 063837 (2018)], to show that the predicted dynamics can successfully explain the experimentally observed features of the transient and prethermal regime.