Superoperator Master Equations and Effective Dynamics

Abstract

We developed the projection method to derive an analog of the quantum master equation for propagators rather than density matrices themselves. As these propagators are superoperators, we call them superoperator master equations. Furthermore, as the projector maps superoperators to superoperators, we call it a hyperprojector. We gave general perturbative expansions for generators of the weak coupling superoperator master equation and the stroboscopic limit superoperator master equation. After that, we considered a particular example of a hyperprojector that is the infinite time average of unitary dynamics. We call it the averaging hyperprojector. We discussed the properties of this hyperprojector and its physical meaning. Then, we illustrated our general second order superoperator master equations arising in the weak coupling limit and the stroboscopic limit, taking the averaging hyperprojector as an example, which we call effective dynamics. We discussed some properties of these superoperator master equations, in particular, the entropy increase.