Quantum systems in Markovian environments

Abstract

In this work, we develop a mathematical framework to model a quantum system whose Hamiltonian may depend on the state of changing environment, that evolves according to a Markovian process. When the environment changes its state, the quantum system may suffer a shock that produces an instantaneous transition among its states. The model that we propose can be readily adapted to more general settings.\\ To avoid collateral analytical issues, we consider the case of quantum systems with finite dimensional state space, in which case the observables are described by Hermitian matrices. We show how to average over the environment to predict the expected values of observables