Exact steady state manifold of a boundary driven spin-1 Lai-Sutherland chain

We present an explicit construction of a family of steady state density matrices for an open integrable spin-1 chain with bilinear and biquadratic interactions, also known as the Lai-Sutherland model, driven far from equilibrium by means of two oppositely polarizing Markovian dissipation channels localized at the boundary. The steady state solution exhibits n+1 fold degeneracy, for a chain of length n, due to existence of (strong) Liouvillian U(1) symmetry. The latter can be exploited to introduce a chemical potential and define a grand canonical nonequilibrium steady state ensemble. The matrix product form of the solution entails an infinitely-dimensional representation of a non-trivial Lie algebra (semidirect product of sl_2 and a non-nilpotent radical) and hints to a novel Yang-Baxter integrability structure.