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 Lindblad master equation with a time-periodic generator (Lindbladian), 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 nonlocal in time. Interestingly, we find that the boundary between the phases depends on when during the period the evolution is stroboscopically monitored. This reveals the nontrivial role played by the micromotion in the dynamics of open Floquet systems.

Many-body localization (MBL) is a result of the balance between interference-based Anderson localization and many-body interactions in a high-dimensional Fock space. It is expected that dissipation is blurring interference and destroying that balance so that the asymptotic state of a system with an MBL Hamiltonian does not bear localization signatures. This is evidently true in the case of local dephasing which drives any system into an infinite-temperature state. We demonstrate, by using a set of dissipative operators, where each one is acting nontrivially on a pair of neighboring sites (or spins), that an MBL system can be brought into a Hamiltonian-specific steady state. The difference between ergodic and MBL Hamiltonians can be seen in statistics of imbalance, entanglement entropy, and level spacing of the steady-state density operator. By introducing pairwise dissipative operators into an MBL system already exposed to dephasing, these localization signatures can be restored.

Floquet engineering of isolated systems is often based on the concept of the effective time-independent Floquet Hamiltonian, which describes the stroboscopic evolution of a periodically driven quantum system in steps of the driving period and which is routinely obtained analytically using high-frequency expansions. The generalization of these concepts to open quantum systems described by a Markovian master equation of Lindblad type turns out to be nontrivial: On the one hand, already for a two-level system two different phases can be distinguished, where the effective time-independent Floquet generator (describing the stroboscopic evolution) is either again Markovian and of Lindblad type or not. On the other hand, even though in the high-frequency regime a Lindbladian Floquet generator (Floquet Lindbladian) is numerically found to exist, this behavior is, curiously, not correctly reproduced within analytical high-frequency expansions. Here, we demonstrate that a proper Floquet Lindbladian can still be obtained from a high-frequency expansion, when treating the problem in a suitably chosen rotating frame. Within this approach, we can then also describe the transition to a phase at lower driving frequencies, where no Floquet Lindbladian exists, and show that the emerging non-Markovianity of the Floquet generator can entirely be attributed to the micromotion of the open driven system.

Evolutionary game theory is a framework to formalize the evolution of collectives (“populations”) of competing agents that are playing a game and, after every round, update their strategies to maximize individual payoffs. There are two complementary approaches to modeling evolution of player populations. The first addresses essentially finite populations by implementing the apparatus of Markov chains. The second assumes that the populations are infinite and operates with a system of mean-field deterministic differential equations. By using a model of two antagonistic populations, which are playing a game with stationary or periodically varying payoffs, we demonstrate that it exhibits metastable dynamics that is reducible neither to an immediate transition to a fixation (extinction of all but one strategy in a finite-size population) nor to the mean-field picture. In the case of stationary payoffs, this dynamics can be captured with a system of stochastic differential equations and interpreted as a stochastic Hopf bifurcation. In the case of varying payoffs, the metastable dynamics is much more complex than the dynamics of the means.

When applied to dynamical systems, both classical and quantum, time periodic modulations can produce complex non-equilibrium states which are often termed “chaotic.” Being well understood within the unitary Hamiltonian framework, this phenomenon is less explored in open quantum systems. Here, we consider quantum chaotic states emerging in a leaky cavity when the intracavity photonic mode is coherently pumped with the pumping intensity varying periodically in time. We show that a single spin when placed inside the cavity and coupled to the mode can moderate transitions between regular and chaotic regimes—that are identified by using quantum Lyapunov exponents or features of photon emission statistics—and thus can be used to control the degree of chaos.

Similar to its classical version, quantum Markovian evolution can be either time-discrete or time-continuous. Discrete quantum Markovian evolution is usually modeled with completely positive trace-preserving maps, while time-continuous evolution is often specified with superoperators referred to as “Lindbladians.” Here, we address the following question: Being given a quantum map, can we find a Lindbladian that generates an evolution identical—when monitored at discrete instances of time—to the one induced by the map? It was demonstrated that the problem of getting the answer to this question can be reduced to an NP-complete (in the dimension $N$ of the Hilbert space, the evolution takes place in) problem. We approach this question from a different perspective by considering a variety of machine learning (ML) methods and trying to estimate their potential ability to give the correct answer. Complimentarily, we use the performance of different ML methods as a tool to validate a hypothesis that the answer to the question is encoded in spectral properties of the so-called Choi matrix, which can be constructed from the given quantum map. As a test bed, we use two single-qubit models for which the answer can be obtained using the reduction procedure. The outcome of our experiment is that, for a given map, the property of being generated by a time-independent Lindbladian is encoded both in the eigenvalues and the eigenstates of the corresponding Choi matrix.