We study the process of heat transfer through an entangled pair of two-level systems, demonstrating the role of quantum correlations in this nonequilibrium process. While quantum correlations generally degrade with increasing the temperature bias, introducing spatial asymmetry leads to an intricate behavior: connecting the qubits unequally to the reservoirs, one finds that quantum correlations persist and increase with the temperature bias when the system is more weakly linked to the hot reservoir. In the reversed case, linking the system more strongly to the hot bath, the opposite, more natural behavior is observed, with quantum correlations being strongly suppressed upon increasing the temperature bias.
We study the process of heat transfer through an entangled pair of two-level systems, demonstrating the role of quantum correlations in this nonequilibrium process. While quantum correlations generally degrade with increasing the temperature bias, introducing spatial asymmetry leads to an intricate behavior: connecting the qubits unequally to the reservoirs, one finds that quantum correlations persist and increase with the temperature bias when the system is more weakly linked to the hot reservoir. In the reversed case, linking the system more strongly to the hot bath, the opposite, more natural behavior is observed, with quantum correlations being strongly suppressed upon increasing the temperature bias.
We study the steady-state entanglement and correlations of an open system comprising two coupled fermions in the equilibrium or nonequilibrium environments and distill the nonequilibrium contribution to the quantum correlations. We show that in the equilibrium condition, the steady-state quantum correlations exhibit nonmonotonic behavior, while in the nonequilibrium case, the monotonicity is determined by many parameters. The entanglement vanishes abruptly upon the increase of the temperature (bias) and chemical potential bias, and it witnesses a critical chemical potential above which the concurrence always remains positive. In the fermionic reservoirs, quantum correlations reach the maximal values when one chemical potential of the reservoirs matches the system frequency. We separate the quantum correlation generation due to the averaged effect from the pure nonequilibrium effect. In contrast with previous results, when the averaged effect is separated out, the nonequilibrium generation of quantum correlation shows a distinctive monotonic behavior. The difference between the large-tunneling regime with decaying correlations and the small-tunneling with increasing correlations is discussed. Near the boundary of the two regimes, the entanglement behavior is a mixture of two extremes, and it resurrects with the increase of chemical potential bias after its previous drop to zero.
Quantum discord captures quantum correlations beyond entanglement and can remain finite even when the entanglement vanishes. We investigate the transient nonequilibrium dynamics and steady-state behavior of quantum discord and classical correlations in a double quantum dot (DQD) system coupled to fermionic reservoirs. By employing a quantum Langevin equation formalism, we obtain the exact reduced density matrix of the system, enabling a comprehensive analysis of its quantum and classical correlations under nonequilibrium conditions. The influence of system-reservoir coupling strength, spectral bandwidth, thermal bias, and varying initial state on both the transient dynamics and steady-state correlations is systematically analyzed. Quantum discord remains finite in the nonequilibrium steady state over a broad parameter range. Although thermal gradients reduce the overall magnitude of correlations, quantum discord persists and exhibits greater resilience. These results demonstrate that nonequilibrium electronic transport, together with the environmental spectral properties and reservoir asymmetry, provides an effective means of controlling nonclassical correlations in mesoscopic systems and establishes quantum discord as a robust hallmark of open fermionic quantum devices.
We investigate how quantum correlations [quantum discord (QD)] of a two-qubit one-dimensional XYZ Heisenberg chain in thermal equilibrium depend on the temperature T of the bath and also on an external magnetic field B. We show that the behavior of thermal QD differs in many unexpected ways from thermal entanglement. For example, we show situations where QD increases with T when entanglement decreases, cases where QD increases with T even in regions with zero entanglement, and that QD signals a quantum phase transition even at finite T. We also show that by properly tuning B or the interaction between the qubits we get nonzero QD for any T and we present an effect not seen for entanglement, the ``regrowth'' of thermal QD.
In the framework of the theory of open systems based on completely positive quantum dynamical semigroups, we give a description of the continuous-variable quantum entanglement and quantum discord for a system consisting of two noninteracting modes embedded in a thermal environment. Entanglement and discord are used to quantify the quantum correlations of the system. For all values of the temperature of the thermal reservoir, an initial separable Gaussian state remains separable for all times. We study the time evolution of logarithmic negativity, which characterizes the degree of entanglement, and show that in the case of an entangled initial Gaussian state, entanglement suppression (entanglement sudden death) takes place, for non-zero temperatures of the environment. Only for a zero temperature of the thermal bath the initial entangled state remains entangled for finite times. We analyze the time evolution of the Gaussian quantum discord, which is a measure of all quantum correlations in the bipartite state, including entanglement, and show that quantum discord decays asymptotically in time under the effect of the thermal bath. This is contrast with the sudden death of entanglement. Before the suppression of the entanglement, the qualitative evolution of quantum discord is very similar to that of the entanglement. We describe also the time evolution of the degree of classical correlations and of quantum mutual information, which measures the total correlations of the quantum system.
In the framework of the theory of open systems based on completely positive quantum dynamical semigroups, we give a description of the quantum correlations of a system consisting of two non-interacting modes embedded in a thermal environment. We describe the evolution of the quantum entanglement in terms of the covariance matrix for Gaussian input states. For all values of the temperature of the thermal reservoir, an initial separable squeezed thermal state remains separable for all times. In the case of an entangled initial squeezed thermal state, entanglement suppression (entanglement sudden death) takes place, for non-zero temperatures of the environment. The Gaussian quantum discord, which is a measure of all quantum correlations in the state, including entanglement, decays asymptotically in time under the effect of the thermal bath.
In the framework of the theory of open systems based on completely positive quantum dynamical semigroups, we give a description of the continuous-variable quantum entanglement and quantum discord for a system consisting of two noninteracting modes embedded in a thermal environment. Entanglement and discord are used to quantify the quantum correlations of the system. For all values of the temperature of the thermal reservoir, an initially separable Gaussian state remains separable for all times. We study the time evolution of logarithmic negativity, which characterizes the degree of entanglement, and we show that in the case of an entangled initial Gaussian state, entanglement suppression (entanglement sudden death) takes place for non-zero temperatures of the environment. Only for zero temperature of the thermal bath the initial entangled state remains entangled for finite times. We analyze time evolution of Gaussian quantum discord, which is a measure of all quantum correlations in the bipartite state, including entanglement, and we show that quantum discord decays asymptotically in time under the effect of thermal bath. This is in contrast with the sudden death of entanglement. Before the suppression of entanglement, the qualitative evolution of quantum discord is very similar to that of the entanglement. We describe also time evolution of the degree of classical correlations and of quantum mutual information, which measures the total correlations of quantum system.