Abstract

Dissipation and measurements are inherent components of quantum technologies. Apart from purely technological applications such as quantum error correction, they can be employed for stabilizing new phases of matter. Phases of matter, whose many-body state and/or dynamics do not have equilibrium counterparts.
I will focus on phase transitions between dissipatively-stabilized topological phases. I will show that a dissipatively-stabilized Kitaev chain exhibits a jump in the topological number, which is not accompanied by any conventional signatures of topological phase transitions. This raises the question of whether the state-based topological classification has predictive power in open quantum systems.