Generalized quantum Zeno dynamics and ergodic means

We prove the existence of uniform limits for certain sequences of products of contractions and elements of a family of uniformly continuous propagators acting on a Hilbert or a Banach space. From the point of view of Quantum Physics, the considered sequences can represent the evolution of a system whose dynamics, described by a continuous propagator, is disturbed by a sequence of generic quantum operations (e.g., projective measurements or unitary pulses). This includes and also generalizes the so-called quantum Zeno dynamics. The time-evolution obtained from the limits of the considered sequences are described by propagators generated by ergodic means. The notion of such ergodic means is generalized in this paper to also include propagators of time-dependent generators, and thus our results can be used to develop new forms of active decoherence suppression. In a similar way, we also consider the effective time-evolution obtained from adding to the possibly time-dependent generator of the original propagator a generator of a uniformly continuous contraction semi-group with asymptotically increasing weight in the sum. By proving a generalized adiabatic theorem, it is shown that also for this set-up the resulting time-evolution is governed by a suitable ergodic mean.