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Steady states of a driven dissipative dipolar XXZ chain

We study theoretically a driven dissipative one-dimensional XXZ spin$-1/2$ chain with dipole coupling and a tunable strength of the Ising and XY interaction. Within a mean-field approximation, we find a rich phase diagram with uniform, spin density wave, antiferromagnetic and oscillatory phases, as well as regions of phase bistability. We study the phase diagram of small quantum systems using exact diagonalisation, and compare the results to the mean-field theory. We find that while expectation values only capture the uniform phases of the mean-field theory, fluctuations about these expectation values give signatures of spatially non-uniform phases and bistabilities. We find these signatures for all ratios of the Ising to XY interaction, showing that they appear to be general features of spin$-1/2$ systems