Time-dependent Variational Principles for Hybrid Non-Unitary Dynamics: Application to Driven-Dissipative Superconductors

Abstract: We introduce time-dependent variational principles to study the non-unitary dynamics of open quantum many-body systems, including dynamics described by the full Lindblad master equation, the non-Hermitian dynamics corresponding to the no-click limit of the fully post-selected quantum trajectories, and the dynamics described by a hybrid Lindbladian with a control parameter $\alpha$ which interpolates between the full post-selection and averaging over all quantum trajectories. As an application we study the non-unitary dynamics of a lossy or driven-dissipative BCS superconductors, evolving in presence of two-body losses and two-body pumps. We show that the non-Hermitian limit acts as a singular limit of the hybrid dissipative dynamics, leading to a sharp modification of the universal approach to the driven-dissipative steady-states. By considering the dissipative dynamics with pair losses, we show that, as the non-Hermitian limit is approached, the density dynamics sharply evolves from a universal power-law to exponential decay that converges towards a quasi-steady plateau characterized by the freezing of the particle depletion due to pair losses. The reached quasi-stationary density increases as a function of the dissipation rate highlighting the emergence of a non-Hermitian Zeno effect in the lossy dynamics. For the driven-dissipative case, we show that, in the non-Hermitian limit, the system gets trapped into an effective negative temperature state, thus skipping the infinite temperature steady-state reached in the presence of finite contribution of the quantum jumps. We rationalize these findings in terms of the conservation of the length of the pseudospins which, in the non-Hermitian limit, suppresses the effective single-particle losses and pumps acting on the non-condensed particles.