Rectification in Nonequilibrium Steady States of Open Many-Body Systems

TL;DR

This paper investigates how specific couplings and baths can induce and control unidirectional particle currents in open many-body fermionic systems, revealing mechanisms for rectification in nonequilibrium steady states.

Contribution

It identifies conditions under which Lindblad operators produce unidirectional currents, including cases where reciprocity is maintained but symmetries are broken.

Findings

Unidirectional currents arise from nonreciprocal Lindblad dynamics.

Breaking inversion and time-reversal symmetries enables rectification.

Analytical and numerical results demonstrate mechanisms with spin-orbit coupling and magnetic fields.

Abstract

We study how translationally invariant couplings of many-particle systems and nonequilibrium baths can be used to rectify particle currents, for which we consider minimal setups to realize bath-induced currents in nonequilibrium steady states of one-dimensional open fermionic systems. We first analyze dissipative dynamics associated with a nonreciprocal Lindblad operator and identify a class of Lindblad operators that are sufficient to acquire a unidirectional current. We show that unidirectional particle transport can in general occur when a Lindblad operator is reciprocal provided that the inversion symmetry and the time-reversal symmetry of the microscopic Hamiltonian are broken. We demonstrate this mechanism on the basis of both analytical and numerical approaches including the Rashba spin-orbit coupling and the Zeeman magnetic field.