English

Internal temperature of quantum chaotic systems at the nanoscale and its detection by a microscopic thermometer

Statistical Mechanics 2017-09-13 v1

Abstract

The extent to which a temperature can be appropriately assigned to a small quantum system, as an internal property but not as a property of any large environment, is still an open problem. In this paper, a method is proposed for solving this problem, by which a studied system is coupled to a two-level system (probe) as a microscopic thermometer. For small quantum chaotic systems, we show that a temperature can be determined, the value of which is sensitive to neither the form, location, and strength of the probe-system coupling, nor the Hamiltonian and initial state of the probe. This temperature turns out to have the form of Boltzmann temperature.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1705.09824,
  title  = {Internal temperature of quantum chaotic systems at the nanoscale and its detection by a microscopic thermometer},
  author = {Jiaozi Wang and Wen-ge Wang},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1705.09824},
  year   = {2017}
}

Comments

8 pages, 4 figures