Rotating-Wave and Secular Approximations for Open Quantum Systems

Quantum Physics [Submitted on 27 Mar 2026] Rotating-Wave and Secular Approximations for Open Quantum Systems Daniel Burgarth, Paolo Facchi, Giovanni Gramegna, Kazuya Yuasa We derive a nonperturbative bound on the distance between evolutions of open quantum systems described by time-dependent generators. We show how this result can be employed to provide an explicit upper bound on the error of the rotating-wave approximation in the presence of dissipation and decoherence. We apply the derived bound to the strong-coupling limit in open quantum systems and to the secular approximation used to obtain a master equation from the Redfield equation. Comments: 28 pages, 2 figures Subjects: Quantum Physics (quant-ph); Mathematical Physics (math-ph) Cite as: arXiv:2603.26606 [quant-ph]   (or arXiv:2603.26606v1 [quant-ph] for this version)   https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2603.26606 Focus to learn more Submission history From: Giovanni Gramegna [view email] [v1] Fri, 27 Mar 2026 17:04:04 UTC (567 KB) Access Paper: HTML (experimental) view license Current browse context: quant-ph < prev   |   next > new | recent | 2026-03 Change to browse by: math math-ph math.MP References & Citations INSPIRE HEP NASA ADS Google Scholar Semantic Scholar Export BibTeX Citation Bookmark Bibliographic Tools Bibliographic and Citation Tools Bibliographic Explorer Toggle Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?) Connected Papers Toggle Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?) Litmaps Toggle Litmaps (What is Litmaps?) scite.ai Toggle scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?) Code, Data, Media Demos Related Papers About arXivLabs Which authors of this paper are endorsers? | Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)