Open and driven-dissipative systems

Atomic, molecular, and optical systems are often subject to dissipation and are often coherently driven by electromagnetic fields. Such driven-dissipative systems, often evolving according to a master equation rather than a Hamiltonian, are much less explored than their dissipationless counterparts. For example, exotic many-body states may emerge as steady states under nonequilibrium dynamics. In this research area, we study nonequilibrium phases and phase transitions in driven-dissipative models---and more generally open systems---and harness these models for applications, such as quantum computing (and in particular passively protected quantum memories), quantum communication, metrology, and sensing.