Steady Schr\"odinger cat state of a driven Ising chain

Abstract

For short-range interacting systems, no Schr\"odinger cat state can be stable when their environment is in thermal equilibrium. We show, by studying a chain of two-level systems with nearest-neighbour Ising interactions, that this is possible when the surroundings consists of two heat reservoirs at different temperatures, or of a heat reservoir and a monochromatic field. The asymptotic state of the considered system can be a pure superposition of mesoscopically distinct states, the all-spin-up and all-spin-down states, at low temperatures. The main feature of our model leading to this result is the fact that the Hamiltonian of the chain and the dominant part of its coupling to the environment obey the same symmetry.