It is very common in the literature to write a Markovian quantum master equation in Lindblad form to describe a system with multiple degrees of freedom and weakly connected to multiple thermal baths which can, in general, be at different temperatures and chemical potentials. However, the microscopically derived quantum master equation up to leading order in a system-bath coupling is of the so-called Redfield form, which is known to not preserve complete positivity in most cases. Additional approximations to the Redfield equation are required to obtain a Lindblad form. We lay down some fundamental requirements for any further approximations to the Redfield equation, which, if violated, leads to physical inconsistencies such as inaccuracies in the leading order populations and coherences in the energy eigenbasis, violation of thermalization, and violation of local conservation laws at the nonequilibrium steady state. We argue that one or more of these conditions will generically be violated in all the weak system-bath-coupling Lindblad descriptions existing in the literature to our knowledge. As an example, we study the recently derived universal Lindblad equation and use these conditions to show the violation of local conservation laws due to inaccurate coherences but accurate populations in the energy eigenbasis. Finally, we exemplify our analytical results numerically in an interacting open quantum spin system.

We investigate the possibility of a Markovian quantum master equation (QME) that consistently describes a finite-dimensional system, a part of which is weakly coupled to a thermal bath. In order to preserve complete positivity and trace, such a QME must be of Lindblad form. For physical consistency, it should additionally preserve local conservation laws and be able to show thermalization. First, we show that the microscopically derived Redfield equation (RE) violates complete positivity unless in extremely special cases. We then prove that imposing complete positivity and demanding preservation of local conservation laws enforces the Lindblad operators and the lamb-shift Hamiltonian to be 'local', i.e, to be supported only on the part of the system directly coupled to the bath. We then cast the problem of finding 'local' Lindblad QME which can show thermalization into a semidefinite program (SDP). We call this the thermalization optimization problem (TOP). For given system parameters and temperature, the solution of the TOP conclusively shows whether the desired type of QME is possible up to a given precision. Whenever possible, it also outputs a form for such a QME. For a XXZ chain of few qubits, fixing a reasonably high precision, we find that such a QME is impossible over a considerably wide parameter regime when only the first qubit is coupled to the bath. Remarkably, we find that when the first two qubits are attached to the bath, such a QME becomes possible over much of the same paramater regime, including a wide range of temperatures.