• Accepted Paper

Interpreting Liouvillian eigenmodes: Quantized orbits in dissipative systems

Ashlin V. Thomas, Felix Fritzsch, Masudul Haque, and Shovan Dutta

Phys. Rev. Lett. - Accepted 22 October, 2026

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/nxhj-g7gh

Abstract

In closed quantum dynamics, energy eigenstates represent physical excitations which, for systems with a classical limit, localize on quantized orbits in phase space. Such a picture is lacking in open systems: Liouvillians have distinct right and left eigenstates that decay with time and are difficult to interpret. We recover a physical correspondence by introducing a gauge-invariant quasiprobability measure combining right and left eigenstates that interprets a Liouvillian mode as a set of coherences, allowing one to visualize the modes as quasiprobability distributions in a “doubled” phase space. Using this measure we show that, remarkably, a damped oscillator retains its quantized “orbits” for a large class of linear and nonlinear loss, with measurable signatures. A thermal bath broadens these orbits, similar to energy levels, leading to a characteristic multistage relaxation. This provides an experimentally accessible open-system analog of the eigenstate-orbit correspondence underlying semiclassical quantization. For quadratic systems, our results yield dissipative analogs of invariant tori—a central concept in Hamiltonian systems.

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