Abstract We establish a connection between non-Markovianity and negative entropy production rate for various classes of quantum operations. We analyse several aspects of unital and thermal operations in connection with resource theories of purity and thermodynamics. We fully characterize Lindblad operators corresponding to unital operations. We also characterize the Lindblad dynamics for a large class of thermal operations. We next generalize the definition of the entropy production rate for the non-equilibrium case to connect it with the rate of change of free energy of the system, and establish complementary relations between non-Markovianity and maximum loss of free energy. We naturally conclude that non-Markovianity in terms of divisibility breaking is a necessary resource for the backflow of other resources like purity or free energy under the corresponding allowed operations.
Abstract We establish a connection between non-Markovianity and negative entropy production rate for various classes of quantum operations. We analyse several aspects of unital and thermal operations in connection with resource theories of purity and thermodynamics. We fully characterize Lindblad operators corresponding to unital operations. We also characterize the Lindblad dynamics for a large class of thermal operations. We next generalize the definition of the entropy production rate for the non-equilibrium case to connect it with the rate of change of free energy of the system, and establish complementary relations between non-Markovianity and maximum loss of free energy. We naturally conclude that non-Markovianity in terms of divisibility breaking is a necessary resource for the backflow of other resources like purity or free energy under the corresponding allowed operations.
We establish the connection between non-Markovianity and negative entropy production rate for various classes of quantum operations. Generalizing the definition of entropy production rate for non-equilibrium case we connect it with the rate of change of free energy of the system and establish complementary relations between non-Markovianity and maximum loss of free energy. We naturally conclude that non-Markovianity, in terms of divisibility breaking is a necessary resource for backflow of other resources like purity or free energy, under corresponding allowed operations. Based on this we propose a resource theory of non-Markovianity by constructing the free operations, free states and a generalized measure of non-Markovianity. The framework satisfies the basic properties of a consistent resource theory. The proposed resource quantifier is lower bounded by the optimization free Rivas-Huelga-Plenio (RHP) measure of non-Markovianity.
Entropy production plays a fundamental role in nonequilibrium thermodynamics to quantify the irreversibility of open systems. Its positivity can be ensured for a wide class of setups, but the entropy production rate can become negative sometimes. This is often taken as an indicator of non-Markovianity. We make this link precise by showing under which conditions a negative entropy production rate implies non-Markovianity and when it does not. For a system coupled to a single heat bath, this can be established within a unified language for two setups: (i) the dynamics resulting from a coarse-grained description of a Markovian master equation and (ii) the classical Hamiltonian dynamics of a system coupled to a bath. The quantum version of the latter result is shown not to hold despite the fact that the integrated thermodynamic description is formally equivalent to the classical case. The instantaneous fixed point of a non-Markovian dynamics plays an important role in our study. Our key contribution is to provide a consistent theoretical framework to study the finite-time thermodynamics of a large class of dynamics with a precise link to its non-Markovianity.
Quantum thermodynamics has emerged as a central field for understanding how energy conversion processes occur in microscopic systems. In these systems, effects such as coherence, entanglement, and non-Markovianity play key roles. In this thesis, we explore different ways to describe quantum thermodynamics, using two main approaches: one based on entropy and the other on ergotropy. First, we introduce a generalized approach to quantify non-Markovianity through the breakdown of monotonicity in thermodynamic functions. In this context, the entropy-based heat flow serves as a practical tool to witness and measure quantum memory in unital maps that do not reverse the sign of the internal energy. Next, we analyze the dynamics of ergotropy in open qubits under both Markovian and non-Markovian evolutions. We identify phenomena such as freezing and sudden death of ergotropy, and we establish an analytical relation between the change in ergotropy and the environment-induced work . This provides a clear physical interpretation for the additional term in the first law in the entropy-based formulation. Finally, we propose an ergotropy-based thermodynamic formulation, in which heat is reinterpreted in terms of the change of the passive state associated with the density operator governing the quantum dynamics. This approach allows one to measure non-Markovianity of unital maps more generally and accurately than the entropy-based heat flow. This advantage comes from the direct link between heat and von Neumann entropy, a property ensured by invariance under passive transformations. Moreover, the out-of-equilibrium temperature naturally remains non-negative, similarly to equilibrium thermodynamics.
Quantum thermodynamics studies how quantum systems and operations may be exploited as sources of work to perform useful thermodynamic tasks. In real-world conditions, the evolution of open quantum systems typically displays memory effects, resulting in a non-Markovian dynamics. The associated information backflow has been observed to provide advantage in certain thermodynamic tasks. However, a general operational connection between non-Markovianity and thermodynamics in the quantum regime has remained elusive. Here, we analyze the role of non-Markovianity in the central task of extracting work via thermal operations from general multitime quantum processes, as described by process tensors. By defining a hierarchy of four classes of extraction protocols, expressed as quantum combs, we reveal three different physical mechanisms (work investment, multitime correlations, and system-environment correlations) through which non-Markovianity increases the work distillable from the process. The advantages arising from these mechanisms are linked precisely to a quantifier of the non-Markovianity of the process. These results show in very general terms how non-Markovianity of any given quantum process is a fundamental resource that unlocks an enhanced performance in thermodynamics.
We discuss fundamental features of the local expression for the entropy production rate of the nonequilibrium quantum dynamics of open systems and its relations to memory effects and the spectrum of the generator of the dynamics. Defining the entropy production rate as negative rate of change of the relative entropy with respect to an instantaneous fixed point, it is shown that positivity of the entropy production rate for all possible initial states implies that the real parts of the eigenvalues of the time-local generator for the quantum master equation are always negative. It is further demonstrated that Markovian dynamics, identified as P-divisibility of the quantum dynamical map, implies positivity of entropy production rate, thus providing a kind of generalized second law in the nonequilibrium regime. We also prove by means of the counterexample of a phase covariant quantum master equation that the converse of this statement is not true, i.e., there are non-Markovian dynamics for which the entropy production rate is always positive. Thus, we conclude that the emergence of negative entropy production rates is a sufficient but not necessary condition for non-Markovianity of the quantum dynamics. Finally, we also consider a recently introduced map-based notion of entropy production and show the equivalence between its positivity and Markovianity for general finite-dimensional systems.
Exploiting the master equations in the Lindblad form, we establish a sufficient and necessary condition for a Markovian dynamics to be unital. Based on this condition, we analyze the dynamical property of quantum R\'enyi entropy and propose a characterization of quantum non-Markovianity for unital dynamics in terms of R\'enyi entropy, which contains the previous criteria of non-Markovianity via von Neumann entropy and linear entropy as particular cases. The effectiveness of this measure in capturing the backflow of information from the environment is illustrated through several typical unital dynamics.