The individual rates describe population relaxation: transfers population from level one to level two, and transfers it back. With and the conventional qubit coordinate ,
Thus is the longitudinal relaxation rate. The parameter is the transverse relaxation rate: it damps the off-diagonal coherence, or the components of the Bloch vector. In the usual completely positive two-level model,
so includes both the coherence loss caused by population relaxation and additional pure dephasing.
There is a normalization switch in the displayed qubit Affine Bloch equation. Its constant term is appropriate to the conventional Pauli matrices and unit-radius coordinate . With the orthonormal generators used earlier, , the same physical rates would instead give a constant term . The drift matrix is unchanged. We interpret the supplied qubit equation in its conventional coordinates.
With zero controls and , , the steady state is unique:
The earlier normalized vector is . Indeed decay as and as .
For vanishing rates, the full equilibrium conditions of the Affine Bloch equation are and , together with . In particular, for nonnegative rates, means both population rates vanish. If then , all diagonal density operators are stationary; if also , every density operator is stationary. The formal case , permits extra transverse equilibrium coordinates, but is excluded by the completely positive rate bound above.