English

Energy exchange statistics and fluctuation theorem for non-thermal asymptotic states

Quantum Physics 2025-01-22 v1 Statistical Mechanics Atomic Physics

Abstract

Exchange energy statistics between two bodies at different thermal equilibrium obey the Jarzynski-W\'ojcik fluctuation theorem. The corresponding energy scale factor is the difference of the inverse temperatures associated to the bodies at equilibrium. In this work, we consider a dissipative quantum dynamics leading the quantum system towards a, possibly non-thermal, asymptotic state. To generalize the Jarzynski-W\'ojcik theorem to non-thermal states, we identify a sufficient condition I{\cal I} for the existence of an energy scale factor η\eta^{*} that is unique, finite and time-independent, such that the characteristic function of the exchange energy distribution becomes identically equal to 11 for any time. This η\eta^* plays the role of the difference of inverse temperatures. We discuss the physical interpretation of the condition I{\cal I}, showing that it amounts to an almost complete memory loss of the initial state. The robustness of our results against quantifiable deviations from the validity of I{\cal I} is evaluated by experimental studies on a single nitrogen-vacancy center subjected to a sequence of laser pulses and dissipation.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2404.05310,
  title  = {Energy exchange statistics and fluctuation theorem for non-thermal asymptotic states},
  author = {Santiago Hernández-Gómez and Francesco Poggiali and Paola Cappellaro and Francesco S. Cataliotti and Andrea Trombettoni and Nicole Fabbri and Stefano Gherardini},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2404.05310},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

14 pages, 4 figures. Comments and feedback are welcome