When a quantum system is placed in thermal environments, we often assume that the system relaxes to the Gibbs state in which decoherence takes place in the system energy eigenbasis. However, when the coupling between the system and the environments is strong, the stationary state is not necessarily the Gibbs state due to environment-induced decoherence, which can be interpreted as a continuous measurement by the environment. Based on the einselection proposed by Zurek, we postulate that the Gibbs state is projected onto the pointer basis due to the continuous measurement. We justify the proposition by exact numerical simulation of a pair of coupled qubits interacting with boson gases. Furthermore, we demonstrate that heat conduction in nonequilibrium steady states can be suppressed in the strong coupling limit also by the environment-induced decoherence.

• Received 3 June 2019

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevResearch.1.033018

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Published by the American Physical Society