Effective quantum Zeno dynamics in dissipative quantum systems

We investigate the time evolution of an open quantum system described by a Lindblad master equation with dissipation acting only on a part of the degrees of freedom H0 of the system, and targeting a unique dark state in H0. We show that, in the Zeno limit of large dissipation, the density matrix of the system traced over the dissipative subspace H0, evolves according to another Lindblad dynamics, with renormalized effective Hamiltonian and weak effective dissipation. This behavior is explicitly checked in the case of Heisenberg spin chains with one or both boundary spins strongly coupled to a magnetic reservoir. Moreover, the populations of the eigenstates of the renormalized effective Hamiltonian evolve in time according to a classical Markov dynamics. As a direct application of this result, we propose a computationally efficient exact method to evaluate the nonequilibrium steady state of a general system in the limit of strong dissipation.