We study the entropy production of an open quantum system surrounded by a complex environment consisting of several heat baths at different temperatures. The detailed balance is elaborated in view of the distinguishable channels provided by the couplings to different heat baths, and a refined entropy production rate is derived accordingly. It is demonstrated that the entropy production rates can characterize the quantum statistical property of the baths: the bosonic and fermionic baths display different behaviors in the high-temperature limit while they have the same asymptotic behavior at low temperature.
We study the entropy production of an open quantum system surrounded by a complex environment consisting of several heat baths at different temperatures. The detailed balance is elaborated in view of the distinguishable channels provided by the couplings to different heat baths, and a refined entropy production rate is derived accordingly. It is demonstrated that the entropy production rates can characterize the quantum statistical property of the baths: the bosonic and fermionic baths display different behaviors in the high-temperature limit while they have the same asymptotic behavior at low temperature.
Thermodynamics is a phenomenological theory describing the energy conversion of work and heat. At its origins thermodynamics was developed in order to understand and improve heat engines. In conventional thermodynamics, however, only such processes are completely describable which are slow enough to keep the system of interest in an equilibrium state with its thermal environment at all times. On the contrary, all real physical processes are accompanied by non-equilibrium phenomena. These are mathematically described with the help of the irreversible entropy production, i.e. the dissipated work divided by the temperature of the bath. The second law of thermodynamics merely states that the irreversible entropy production is on average always positive. The modern trend of miniaturization, however, leads to smaller and smaller devices. On short length scales thermal noise as well as quantum fluctuations become important. Thus, usual thermodynamic quantities as work and heat acquire stochastic nature. Moreover, in the quantum regime a completely new theory had to be invented, since classical notions of work and heat are no longer valid. The present dissertation contributes to this prevailing field by the derivation of analytical expressions for the entropy production in open and closed quantum system far from thermal equilibrium. The theoretical treatment is motivated by an experimental point of view. The obtained results were derived from the reduced dynamics of the quantum mechanical system, which may be coupled to a thermal bath. To this end, it was dealt with methods and approaches of statistical physics, conventional thermodynamics, quantum information theory and the theory of open quantum systems. In this dissertation the most important physical systems are treated. First, an isolated system is considered before later on a heat bath is included. The limit of weak as well as of strong coupling are analyzed in detail. For isolated systems it turns out that a geometric approach is able to capture the thermodynamic properties, completely. To this end, the irreversible entropy production is sharply estimated from below by the angle between the real non-equilibrium state and the corresponding equilibrium one. Further, it is shown that the Heisenberg uncertainty relation for energy and time can be formulated more precisely in terms of that angle. As experimental system cold ion traps are introduced, in which the theoretical predictions can be verified. For weakly coupled systems, then, the irreversible entropy production is identified and a fluctuation theorem is derived by merely thermodynamic arguments. As experimental system we, again, propose the cold ion traps, where the heat bath can be simulated with the help of LASER light. In the limit of strong coupling a semiclassical description of the reduced quantum system is discussed. Again, an analytically exact expression for the entropy production and the corresponding fluctuation theorem is derived. A physical system, in which strong coupling to the environment can be analyzed, is given by Josephson junctions. This dissertation discusses the entropy production for isolated, weakly coupled, and overdamped quantum systems. For these physical regimes analytical relation are derived and experimental systems proposed, with which the predictions can be verified.
We examine the elements of the balance equation of entropy in open quantum evolutions and their response as we go from a Markovian to a non-Markovian situation. In particular, we look at the heat current and entropy production rate in the non-Markovian reduced evolution, as well as a Markovian limit of the same, experienced by one of two interacting systems immersed in a Markovian bath. The analysis naturally leads us to define a heat current deficit and an entropy production rate deficit, which are differences between the global and local versions of the corresponding quantities. The investigation leads, in certain cases, to a complementarity of the time-integrated heat current deficit and the relative entropy of entanglement between the two systems.
We compare several definitions of entropy production rate introduced in the literature from a large variety of situations and motivations, and then analyze their relations with memory effects. Considering a relevant experimental example of a qubit interacting with a single bosonic mode playing the role of a finite bath, we show that all definitions of entropy production coincide at weak coupling. In a stronger coupling regime, significant discrepancies emerge between the different entropy production rates, although some similarities in the overall behaviour remain. However, surprisingly, two of these definitions --one based on local quantities of the system and the other on non-local quantities-- coincide exactly, even in the case of strong coupling. Finally, a high degree of correspondence is observed when memory effects characterized by P-divisibility are compared with the sign of all entropy production rates in the case of weak coupling. Such correspondence degrades at stronger coupling, leading us to extend the concept of entropy production to the dynamical map. We show a perfect equivalence between the sign of this enlarged concept of entropy production and P-divisibility, both numerically and analytically, in the case of phase-covariant master equations.
When an open system comes into contact with several thermal baths, the entropy produced by the irreversible processes (dS_{i}=dS-∑_{α} đQ_{α}/T_{α}) keeps increasing, and this entropy production rate is always non-negative. However, when the system comes into contact with nonthermal baths containing quantum coherence or squeezing, this entropy production formula does not apply. In this paper, we study the increasing rate of mutual information between an open system and its environment. In the case of canonical thermal baths, we prove that this mutual information production rate could return exactly to the previous entropy production rate. Furthermore, we study an example of a single boson mode that comes into contact with multiple squeezed thermal baths, where the conventional entropy production rate does not apply, and we find that this mutual information production rate remains non-negative, which indicates a monotonic increase in the correlation between the system and its environment.
In the weak-coupling limit approach to open quantum systems, the presence of the bath is eliminated and accounted for by a master equation that introduces dissipative contributions to the system reduced dynamics: within this framework, there are no bath entropy contributions to the entropy balance. We show that, as a consequence, the entropy production fails to be positive for a class of physically legitimate, that is completely positive and trace preserving, non-Markovian dynamical maps. Moreover, in absence of the semigroup property, if the reduced dynamics has a thermal asymptotic state, this need not be stationary. Then even the integrated entropy production becomes negative. These observations imply that, when the conditions leading to reduced dynamics of semigroup type are relaxed, a consistent formulation of the second law of thermodynamics requires that the environment contribution to the entropy balance be explicitly taken into account.
The Markovian evolution of an open quantum system is characterized by a positive entropy production, while the global entropy gets redistributed between the system and the environment degrees of freedom. Starting from these premises, we analyze the entropy variation of an open quantum system in terms of two distinct relations: the Clausius inequality, that provides an intrinsic bound for the entropy variation in terms of the heat absorbed by the system, and an extrinsic inequality, which instead relates the former to the corresponding entropy increment of the environment. By modeling the thermalization process with a Markovian collisional model, we compare and discuss the two bounds, showing that the latter is asymptotically saturated in the limit of large interaction time. In this regime not only the reduced density matrix of the system reaches an equilibrium configuration, but it also factorizes from the environment degrees of freedom. This last result is proven analytically when the system-bath coupling is sufficiently strong and through numerical analysis in the weak-coupling regime.