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arXiv:1206.2577

Operational typicality of the nonequilibrium states: a thermodynamic lower bound of the deviation from equilibrium

Takaaki Monnai

Published Jun 12, 2012• 0 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

The typicality of the canonical state shows that majority of the states are indistinguishable from equilibrium, and thus the nonequilibrium states are exceptionally rare in the extremely high-dimensional Hilbert space. On the contrary, we can easily apply an external force acting on the system, and then the actual density matrix quantitatively deviates from the canonical state specified by the system Hamiltonian at each instance. To express how the external forcing amounts to the deviation from equilibrium, we give a universal thermodynamic expression of the lower bound of Hilbert-Schmidt distance between the actual nonequilibrium and corresponding canonical states. The lower bound is expressed only by the amount of forcing and its consequent entropy production rate.

DOI
10.48550/arxiv.1206.2577

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The typicality of the canonical state shows that majority of the states are indistinguishable from equilibrium, and thus the nonequilibrium states are exceptionally rare in the extremely high-dimensional Hilbert space. On the contrary, we can easily apply an external force acting on the system, and then the actual density matrix quantitatively deviates from the canonical state specified by the system Hamiltonian at each instance. To express how the external forcing amounts to the deviation from equilibrium, we give a universal thermodynamic expression of the lower bound of Hilbert-Schmidt distance between the actual nonequilibrium and corresponding canonical states. The lower bound is expressed only by the amount of forcing and its consequent entropy production rate.
A system composed of identical spins and described by a quantum mechanical pure state is analyzed within the statistical framework presented in Part I of this work. We explicitly derive the typical values of the entropy, of the energy, and of the equilibrium reduced density matrix of a subsystem for the two different statistics introduced in Part I. In order to analyze their consistency with thermodynamics, these quantities of interest are evaluated in the limit of large number of components of the isolated system. The main results can be summarized as follows: typical values of the entropy and of the equilibrium reduced density matrix as functions of the internal energy in the fixed expectation energy ensemble do not satisfy the requirement of thermodynamics. On the contrary, the thermodynamical description is recovered from the random pure state ensemble (RPSE), provided that one considers systems large enough. The thermodynamic limit of the considered properties for the spin system reveals a number of important features. First canonical statistics (and thus, canonical typicality as long as the fluctuations around the average value are small) emerges without the need of assuming the microcanonical space for the global pure state. Moreover, we rigorously prove (i) the equivalence of the "global temperature," derived from the entropy equation of state, with the "local temperature" determining the canonical state of the subsystems; and (ii) the equivalence between the RPSE typical entropy and the canonical entropy for the overall system.
The response of a quantum system in a pure state to an external force is investigated by reconsidering the standard statistical approach to quantum dynamics on the light of the statistical description of equilibrium based on typicality. We prove that the response of the large majority of quantum pure states subjected to the same arbitrary external perturbation tends to be close to the statistical response as the dimension of the Hilbert space increases. This is what we can term dynamical typicality. The theoretical analysis is substantiated by numerical simulations of the response of a spin system to a sudden quench of the external magnetic field. For the considered system we show that not only the system relaxes toward a new equilibrium state after the quench of the Hamiltonian but also that such a new equilibrium is compatible with the description of a thermal equilibrium.
We consider the generic model of a finite-size quantum electron system connected to two (temperature and particle) reservoirs. The quantum open system is driven out of equilibrium by the presence of both potential temperature and chemical differences between the two reservoirs. The nonequilibrium (NE) thermodynamical properties of such a quantum open system are studied for the steady state regime. In such a regime, the corresponding NE density matrix is built on the so-called generalised Gibbs ensembles. From different expressions of the NE density matrix, we can identify the terms related to the entropy production in the system. We show, for a simple model, that the entropy production rate is always a positive quantity. Alternative expressions for the entropy production are also obtained from the Gibbs–von Neumann conventional formula and discussed in detail. Our results corroborate and expand earlier works found in the literature.
We show that it is possible to calculate equilibrium expectation values of many-body correlated quantities such as the characteristic functions and probability distributions with the use of only a single typical pure state. It also means that we can apply the pure state approach to Heisenberg operators and their spectral fluctuation, and hence to nonequilibrium processes starting from equilibrium. In particular, we can accurately analyze the full statistics of entropy production in nonequilibrium mesoscopic systems. In this way, we can access the full information on higher-order fluctuations in the large deviation regime far from equilibrium.
Equilibrium thermodynamics emerges because a vast number of microscopic states become indistinguishable at the level of local observables. We start from the observation that a nonequilibrium quantum state can also be represented by an ensemble of pure states that minimizes the average energy variance. We show that varying the statistical weights within this optimal family organizes state space into ``minimum-variance leaves'', which generalize the space of stationary states underlying equilibrium. We observe thermodynamic compression on the leaves, which in the simplest scenario manifests itself in the indistinguishability of states with the same energy density. We call this ``leaf typicality''; at equilibrium it reduces to eigenstate thermalization or its generalizations. Numerical tests support leaf typicality on some leaves and indicate a breakdown of its stronger forms on others, suggesting a rich thermodynamic organization beyond equilibrium. These results open a route to a unified statistical mechanics of equilibrium and nonequilibrium quantum states.