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arXiv:2603.01861

Local approach to entropy production in the nonequilibrium dynamics of open quantum systems

Irene Ada Picatoste, Alessandra Colla, Heinz-Peter Breuer

quant-phSubmitted Mar 2, 2026• Announced Mar 3, 2026• 0 citations
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Abstract

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.

Comments
15 pages, 5 figures

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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.
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.
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.
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.
We investigate a total thermodynamic entropy production rate of an isolated quantum system. In particular, we consider a quantum model of coupled harmonic oscillators in a star configuration, where a central harmonic oscillator (system) is coupled to a finite number of surrounding harmonic oscillators (bath). In this model, when the initial state of the total system is given by the tensor product of the Gibbs states of the system and the bath, every harmonic oscillator is always in a Gibbs state with a time-dependent temperature. This enables us to define time-dependent thermodynamic entropy for each harmonic oscillator and total nonequilibrium thermodynamic entropy as the summation of them. We analytically confirm that the total thermodynamic entropy satisfies the third law of thermodynamics. Our numerical solutions show that, even when the dynamics of the system is well approximated by the Gorini-Kossakowski-Sudarshan-Lindblad (GKSL)-type Markovian master equation, the total thermodynamic entropy production rate can be negative, while the total thermodynamic entropy satisfies the second law of thermodynamics. This result is a counterexample to the common belief that the total entropy production rate is non-negative when the system is under the GKSL-type Markovian dynamics.
Entropy production provides a general way to state the second law of thermodynamics for nonequilibrium scenarios.In open quantum system dynamics, it also serves as a useful quantifier of the degree of irreversibility.In this work we shed light on the relation between correlations, initial preparation of the system, and non-Markovianity by studying a system of two harmonic oscillators independently interacting with their local baths.Their dynamics, described by a time-local master equation, is solved to show, both numerically and analytically, that the global purity of the initial state of the system influences the behavior of the entropy production rate and that the latter depends algebraically on the entanglement that characterizes the initial state.
An exact canonical master equation of the Lindblad form is derived for a central spin interacting uniformly with a sea of completely unpolarized spins. The Kraus operators for the dynamical map are also derived. The non-Markovianity of the dynamics in terms of the divisibility breaking of the dynamical map and the increase of the trace distance fidelity between quantum states is shown. Moreover, it is observed that the irreversible entropy production rate is always negative (for a fixed initial state) whenever the dynamics exhibits non-Markovian behavior. In continuation with the study of witnessing non-Markovianity, it is shown that the positive rate of change of the purity of the central qubit is a faithful indicator of the non-Markovian information backflow. Given the experimental feasibility of measuring the purity of a quantum state, a possibility of experimental demonstration of non-Markovianity and the negative irreversible entropy production rate is addressed. This gives the present work considerable practical importance for detecting the non-Markovianity and the negative irreversible entropy production rate.