Exact steady state of perturbed open quantum systems

Abstract

We present a general non-perturbative method to determine the exact steady state of open quantum systems under perturbation. The method works for systems with a unique steady state and the perturbation may be time-independent or periodic, and of arbitrarily large amplitude. Using the Drazin inverse and a single diagonalization, we construct an operator that generates the entire dependence of the steady state on the perturbation parameter. The approach also enables exact analytic operations-such as differentiation, integration, and ensemble averaging-with respect to the parameter, even when the steady state is computed numerically. We apply the method to three non-trivial open quantum systems, showing that it achieves exact results, with a computational speedup of one to several orders of magnitude for calculations requiring large sampling, compared to previous approaches.