Toward a phenomenological theory of thermalization for quantum many-body systems. A Lindblad-based approach

Massimo Ostilli, Carlo Presilla

Published 2016-11-09Version 1

On the base of the general Lindblad equation, we build a phenomenological theory of thermalization where, assigned the environment, the Lindblad operators are determined by exploiting a few basic thermodynamic principles. Here, we specialize this procedure to the case in which the environment is a blackbody radiation and the system is a set of $N$ noninteracting atoms. For such systems, degeneracies of the energy levels and/or of the energy gaps are unavoidable, even if the spectra of each atom are nondegenerate. We show that our phenomenological approach leads to a consistent scenario for the dissipation and decoherence times, resolving a number of serious pathologies present in the popular quantum optical master equation.