No Arabic abstract
Irreversibility is a fundamental concept with important implications at many levels. It pinpoints the fundamental difference between the intrinsically reversible microscopic equations of motion and the unidirectional arrow of time that emerges at the macroscopic level. More pragmatically, a full quantification of the degree of irreversibility of a given process can help in the characterisation of the performance of thermo-machines operating at the quantum level. Here, we review the concept of entropy production, which is commonly intended as {it the} measure of thermodynamic irreversibility of a process, pinpointing the features and shortcomings of its current formulation.
The dissipation generated during a quasistatic thermodynamic process can be characterised by introducing a metric on the space of Gibbs states, in such a way that minimally-dissipating protocols correspond to geodesic trajectories. Here, we show how to generalize this approach to open quantum systems by finding the thermodynamic metric associated to a given Lindblad master equation. The obtained metric can be understood as a perturbation over the background geometry of equilibrium Gibbs states, which is induced by the Kubo-Mori-Bogoliubov (KMB) inner product. We illustrate this construction on two paradigmatic examples: an Ising chain and a two-level system interacting with a bosonic bath with different spectral densities.
We derive a general scheme to obtain quantum fluctuation relations for dynamical observables in open quantum systems. For concreteness we consider Markovian non-unitary dynamics that is unraveled in terms of quantum jump trajectories, and exploit techniques from the theory of large deviations like the tilted ensemble and the Doob transform. Our results here generalise to open quantum systems fluctuation relations previously obtained for classical Markovian systems, and add to the vast literature on fluctuation relations in the quantum domain, but without resorting to the standard two-point measurement scheme. We illustrate our findings with three examples in order to highlight and discuss the main features of our general result.
The relation between the thermodynamic entropy production and non-Markovian evolutions is matter of current research. Here, we study the behavior of the stochastic entropy production in open quantum systems undergoing unital non-Markovian dynamics. In particular, for the family of Pauli channels we show that in some specific time intervals both the average entropy production and the variance can decrease, provided that the quantum dynamics fails to be P-divisible. Although the dynamics of the system is overall irreversible, our result may be interpreted as a transient tendency towards reversibility, described as a delta peaked distribution of entropy production around zero. Finally, we also provide analytical bounds on the parameters in the generator giving rise to the quantum system dynamics, so as to ensure irreversibility mitigation of the corresponding non-Markovian evolution.
If an open quantum system is initially uncorrelated from its environment, then its dynamics can be written in terms of a Lindblad-form master equation. The master equation is divided into a unitary piece, represented by an effective Hamiltonian, and a dissipative piece, represented by a hermiticity-preserving superoperator; however, the division of open system dynamics into unitary and dissipative pieces is non-unique. For finite-dimensional quantum systems, we resolve this non-uniqueness by specifying a norm on the space of dissipative superoperators and defining the canonical Hamiltonian to be the one whose dissipator is minimal. We show that the canonical Hamiltonian thus defined is equivalent to the Hamiltonian initially defined by Lindblad, and that it is uniquely specified by requiring the dissipators jump operators to be traceless. For a system weakly coupled to its environment, we give a recursive formula for computing the canonical effective Hamiltonian to arbitrary orders in perturbation theory, which we can think of as a perturbative scheme for renormalizing the systems bare Hamiltonian.
An open quantum system, whose time evolution is governed by a master equation, can be driven into a given pure quantum state by an appropriate design of the system-reservoir coupling. This points out a route towards preparing many body states and non-equilibrium quantum phases by quantum reservoir engineering. Here we discuss in detail the example of a emph{driven dissipative Bose Einstein Condensate} of bosons and of paired fermions, where atoms in an optical lattice are coupled to a bath of Bogoliubov excitations via the atomic current representing emph{local dissipation}. In the absence of interactions the lattice gas is driven into a pure state with long range order. Weak interactions lead to a weakly mixed state, which in 3D can be understood as a depletion of the condensate, and in 1D and 2D exhibits properties reminiscent of a Luttinger liquid or a Kosterlitz-Thouless critical phase at finite temperature, with the role of the ``finite temperature played by the interactions.