Steady States of Infinite-Size Dissipative Quantum Chains via Imaginary Time Evolution

Directly in the thermodynamic limit, we show how to combine local imaginary and real-time evolution of tensor networks to efficiently and accurately find the nonequilibrium steady states (NESSs) of one-dimensional dissipative quantum lattices governed by a local Lindblad master equation. The imaginary time evolution first bypasses any highly correlated portions of the real-time evolution trajectory by directly converging to the weakly correlated subspace of the NESS, after which, real-time evolution completes the convergence to the NESS with high accuracy. We demonstrate the power of the method with the dissipative transverse field quantum Ising chain. We show that a crossover of an order parameter shown to be smooth in previous finite-size studies remains smooth in the thermodynamic limit.