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arXiv:2102.06694 · Physical Review A

Heat current and entropy production rate in local non-Markovian quantum dynamics of global Markovian evolution

Ahana Ghoshal, Ujjwal Sen

Published Feb 17, 2022• 8 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

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.

DOI
10.1103/physreva.105.022424

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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.
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.
The quantum speed limit for open quantum systems in the non-Markovian regime is analyzed. We provide a lower bound for the time required to transform an initial state to a final state in terms of thermodynamic quantities such as the energy fluctuation, entropy production rate, and dynamical activity. Such bound was already analyzed for Markovian evolution satisfying detailed balance condition. Here we generalize this approach to deal with arbitrary evolution governed by a time-local generator. Our analysis is illustrated by three paradigmatic examples of qubit evolution: amplitude damping, pure dephasing, and the eternally non-Markovian evolution.
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.
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.
Quantum speed limit (QSL) for open quantum systems in the non-Markovian regime is analyzed. We provide the lower bound for the time required to transform an initial state to a final state in terms of thermodynamic quantities such as the energy fluctuation, entropy production rate and dynamical activity. Such bound was already analyzed for Markovian evolution satisfying detailed balance condition. Here we generalize this approach to deal with arbitrary evolution governed by time-local generator. Our analysis is illustrated by three paradigmatic examples of qubit evolution: amplitude damping, pure dephasing, and the eternally non-Markovian evolution.
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.