We study a one-dimensional Fermi gas in the presence of dissipative coupling to environment through the Lindblad equation. The dissipation involves energy exchange with the environment and favours the relaxation of electrons to excitations. After switching on the dissipation, the system approaches a steady state, which is described by a generalized Gibbs ensemble. The fermionic single particle density matrix resembles deceivingly to that in a hermitian interaction quench. It decays inversely with the distance for short times due to the fermionic correlations in the initial state, which changes into a noninteger power law decay for late times, representing dissipation-induced Luttinger liquid behavior. However, the crossover between the two regions occurs due to dissipation-induced damping, and is unrelated to the propagation of excitations. The velocity of information spreading is set by the dissipative coupling, and differs significantly from the original sound velocity. The thermodynamic entropy grows as $-t\ln t$ initially, and saturates to an extensive value. Our results can be tested experimentally in one-dimensional Dirac systems.

• Received 7 December 2019
• Accepted 9 March 2020

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.124.136401