A decoherence mechanism in the transition from pure quantum- mechanical systems to thermodynamical systems is proposed. We see that a quantum-mechanical expression of temperature is derived and the expression for boson systems and that for fermion systems are different. An application to the calculation of change of temperatures is investigated in a quasi-static process and numerical analyses for mixing of two gases with different temperatures are carried out. Considerations in terms of ultra-power representations of nonstandard-analysis are also presented.
A decoherence mechanism in the transition from pure quantum- mechanical systems to thermodynamical systems is proposed. We see that a quantum-mechanical expression of temperature is derived and the expression for boson systems and that for fermion systems are different. An application to the calculation of change of temperatures is investigated in a quasi-static process and numerical analyses for mixing of two gases with different temperatures are carried out. Considerations in terms of ultra-power representations of nonstandard-analysis are also presented.
A quasi-static process is realized in a purely quantum-mechanical model which is described by oscillator (or particle) systems having relative-phase interactions. Time development of a mixture of two oscillator (or particle) systems which have different temperatures is investigated in the quantum mechanical framework. We study how they go to a thermal equilibrium. Time dependence of the temperature of the object is numerically studied and the difference of the time dependence between classical objects and quantum objects is clearly pointed out.
A quasi-static process is realized in a purely quantum-mechanical model which is described by oscillator (or particle) systems having relative-phase interactions. Time development of a mixture of two oscillator (or particle) systems which have different temperatures is investigated in the quantum mechanical framework. We study how they go to a thermal equilibrium. Time dependence of the temperature of the object is numerically studied and the difference of the time dependence between classical objects and quantum objects is clearly pointed out.
We investigate the non-equilibrium thermodynamics of pure decoherence. In a pure decoherence process, the system Hamiltonian is a constant of motion and there is no direct energy exchange between the system and its surroundings. Nevertheless, the environment’s energy is not generally conserved and in this work we show that this leads to non-trivial heat dissipation as a result of decoherence alone. This heat has some very distinctive properties: it obeys an integral fluctuation relation and can be interpreted in terms of the entropy production associated with populations in the energy eigenbasis of the initial state. We show that the heat distribution for a pure decoherence process is different from the distribution of work done by the initial system–bath interaction quench. Instead, it corresponds to a mixture of work distributions of cyclical processes, each conditioned on a state of the open system. Inspired by recent experiments on impurities in ultracold gases, we demonstrate our general results by studying the heat generated by the decoherence of a qubit immersed within a degenerate Fermi gas in the lowest band of a species-selective optical lattice.
Quantum Mechanics was established as the theory of the microscopic world, which allowed to understand processes in atoms and molecules. Its emergence led to a new scientific paradigm that quickly spread to different research fields. Two relevant examples are Quantum Thermodynamics and Quantum Many-Body Theory, where the former aims to characterize thermodynamic processes in quantum systems and the latter intends to understand the properties of quantum many-body systems. In this thesis, we tackle some of the questions in the overlap between these disciplines, focusing on the concepts of temperature and correlations. Specifically, it contains results on the following topics: locality of temperature, correlations in long-range interacting systems and thermometry at low temperature. The problem of locality of temperature is considered for a system at thermal equilibrium and consists in studying whether it is possible to assign a temperature to any of the subsystems of the global system such that both local and global temperatures are equal. We tackle this problem in two different settings, for generic one-dimensional spin chains and for a bosonic system with a phase transition at non-zero temperature. In the first case, we consider generic one-dimensional translation-invariant spin systems with short-range interactions and prove that it is always possible to assign a local temperature equal to the global one for any temperature, including at criticality. For the second case, we consider a three-dimensional discretized version of the Bose-Einstein model at the grand canonical ensemble for some temperature and particle density, and characterize its non-zero-temperature phase transition. Then, we show that temperature is locally well-defined at any temperature and at any particle density, including at the phase transition. Additionally, we observe a qualitative relation between correlations and locality of temperature in the system. Moving to correlations, we consider fermionic two-site long-range interacting systems at thermal equilibrium. We show that correlations between anti-commutative operators at non-zero temperature are upper bounded by a function that decays polynomially with the distance and with an exponent that is equal to the interaction exponent, which characterizes the interactions in the Hamiltonian. Moreover, we show that our bound is asymptotically tight and that the results extend to density-density correlations as well as other types of correlations for quadratic and fermionic Hamiltonians with long-range interactions. Regarding the results on thermometry, we consider a bosonic model and prove that strong coupling between the probe and the system can boost the thermal sensitivity for low temperature. Furthermore, we provide a feasible measurement scheme capable of producing optimal estimates at the considered regime.
The rather new field of quantum thermodynamics intends to derive thermodynamics from quantum mechanics, as well as to study thermodynamical behavior of quantum systems. It turns out that, indeed, thermalization can be obtained even for very small quantum systems due to the interaction with an appropriate environment. The consideration of an ensemble, as in statistical mechanics, is not necessary. However, the total system - consisting of system and environment - in quantum thermodynamics is usually considered to be closed. In particular, there exists no interaction with an external observer. Since quantum measurements typically influence the measured system, one may wonder which influence such an observation will have in the quantum thermodynamical setting. In this thesis, we study this influence of measurements in quantum thermodynamical systems. It turns out that various concepts known from statistical mechanics arise from such a "quantum thermodynamics under observation", although they do not have any meaning in the isolated quantum thermodynamical setting. The model discussed in the first part consists of a two-level system coupled to a large spin environment, the magnetization of which is measured periodically. This leads to quasi-classical trajectories for the system and - as in statistical mechanics - thermalization and temperature only have a meaning in terms of an ensemble average or a long-time average. Calculating these averages, we prove the ergodicity of the system. Interestingly, the entropy of the obtained attractor state depends on the time between the measurements and can be shown to be connected with the subjective lack of knowledge of the observer. In case of optimal measurements, the ensemble averaged state of the system under periodic measurements equals the state of the system in the quantum thermodynamical model without measurements. Introducing a detuning between system and environment, we find that the system can be prepared in almost arbitrary thermal states due to the periodic measurements. Even the creation of inversion becomes possible. As shown in numerical simulations, our results, which were analytically obtained for large environments, are even applicable to describe the behavior of the system coupled to small environments consisting of only a few spins. Besides measurements of the environment, we also study direct projective measurements of the system, as well as measurements with finite duration, obtaining that the dynamics of the system is almost independent of the concrete realization of the measurements. In the second part of the thesis, we discuss the meaning of temperature fluctuations in quantum thermodynamical systems. In statistical mechanics, there exist different approaches to the problem of temperature fluctuations, which lead to the well-known temperature fluctuation formula. The nature and operational accessibility of these fluctuations, however, remains rather unclear. We argue that according to quantum thermodynamics a system relaxes into a quasi-stationary thermal state and therefore the temperature does not fluctuate. However, since temperature is not an observable, it can only be determined indirectly. For modular systems, we show that the fluctuations of the temperature estimate obtained from a single energy measurement, indeed, are given by the temperature fluctuation formula derived in statistical mechanics, but only within a certain temperature range. The validity range of this formula increases with increasing size of the system. Thus, one can conclude that these "temperature fluctuations" can be interpreted as representing a fundamental limit for the instantaneous determination of temperature.
Atom-molecule equilibrium for molecular formation processes is discussed for boson-fermion, fermion-fermion, and boson-boson mixtures of ultracold atomic gases in the framework of quasichemical equilibrium theory. After presentation of the general formulation, zero-temperature phase diagrams of the atom-molecule equilibrium states are calculated analytically; molecular, mixed, and dissociated phases are shown to appear for the change of the binding energy of the molecules. The temperature dependences of the atom or molecule densities are calculated numerically, and finite-temperature phase structures are obtained of the atom-molecule equilibrium in the mixtures. The transition temperatures of the atom or molecule Bose-Einstein condensations are also evaluated from these results. Quantum-statistical deviations of the law of mass action in atom-molecule equilibrium, which should be satisfied in mixtures of classical Maxwell-Boltzmann gases, are calculated, and the difference in the different types of quantum-statistical effects is clarified. Mean-field calculations with interparticle interactions (atom-atom, atom-molecule, and molecule-molecule) are formulated, where interaction effects are found to give the linear density-dependent term in the effective molecular binding energies. This method is applied to calculations of zero-temperature phase diagrams, where new phases with coexisting local-equilibrium states are shown to appear in the case of strongly repulsive interactions.