Symmetry of bilinear master equations for a quantum oscillator

Abstract

We study the most general continuous transformation on the generators of bilinear master equations of a quantum oscillator. We find that transformation operators that preserve the hermiticity of density operators and conserve the probability of reduced dynamics should be adjoint-symmetric, and they are not limited to the pure product of unitary operators in the bra and ket space but could be a mixture of them. We need to include the more general transformation operators to explore the full symmetry of generic reduced dynamics. We discuss how the operators are related to those considered in previous works, and illustrate how they leave the reduced dynamics form invariant, or map one into the other. The positive semidefinite requirement on the density operator can be imposed to give a valid range of transformation parameters.