Abstract
We study noninteracting fermionic systems dissipatively driven at their boundaries, focusing in particular on the case of a non-number-conserving Hamiltonian, which for example describes an XY spin chain. We show that despite the lack of number conservation, it is possible to convert the problem of calculating the normal modes of the master equations and their corresponding rapidities, into diagonalizing simply an L x L tridiagonal bordered 2-Toeplitz matrix, where L is the size of the system. Such structure of matrix allows us to further reduce the problem into solving a scalar trigonometric nonlinear equation for which we also show, in the case of an Ising chain, exact analytical explicit, and system size independent, solutions.