Area law for steady states of detailed-balance local Lindbladians

Abstract

We study steady-states of quantum Markovian processes whose evolution is described by local Lindbladians. We assume that the Lindbladian is gapped and satisfies quantum detailed balance with respect to a unique full-rank steady state $\sigma$. We show that under mild assumptions on the Lindbladian terms, which can be checked efficiently, the Lindbladian can be mapped to a local Hamiltonian on a doubled Hilbert space that has the same spectrum, and a ground state that is the vectorization of $\sigma^{1/2}$. Consequently, we can use Hamiltonian complexity tools to study the steady states of such open systems. In particular, we show an area-law in the mutual information for the steady state of such 1D systems, together with a tensor-network representation that can be found efficiently.