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In this work we present a formalism to describe non equilibrium conditions in systems with a discretized energy spectrum, such as quantum systems. We develop a formalism based on a combination of Gibbs-Shannon entropy and information…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2013-07-23 Alessio Gagliardi , Alessandro Pecchia , Aldo Di Carlo

Absolute temperature, the fundamental temperature scale in thermodynamics, is usually bound to be positive. Under special conditions, however, negative temperatures - where high-energy states are more occupied than low-energy states - are…

Very recently, the validity of the concept of negative temperature has been challenged by several authors since they consider Boltzmann's entropy (that allows negative temperatures) inconsistent from a mathematical and statistical point of…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2016-12-21 Pierfrancesco Buonsante , Roberto Franzosi , Augusto Smerzi

An attempt toward the operational formulation of quantum thermodynamics is made by employing the recently proposed operations forming positive operator-valued measures for generating thermodynamic processes. The quantity of heat as well as…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2015-06-04 Sumiyoshi Abe , Yuki Aoyaghi

We extend on ideas from standard thermodynamics to show that temperature can be assigned to a general nonequilibrium quantum system. By choosing a physically motivated complete set of observables and expanding the system state thereupon,…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2021-05-26 S. Alipour , F. Benatti , M. Afsary , F. Bakhshinezhad , M. Ramezani , T. Ala-Nissila , A. T. Rezakhani

Interactions between a quantum system and its environment at low temperatures can lead to violations of thermal laws for the system. The source of these violations is the entanglement between system and environment, which prevents the…

Other Condensed Matter · Physics 2015-05-20 Nathan S. Williams , Karyn Le Hur , Andrew N. Jordan

For more than 100 years, one of the central concepts in statistical mechanics has been the microcanonical ensemble, which provides a way of calculating the thermodynamic entropy for a specified energy. A controversy has recently emerged…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2016-07-04 Michael Matty , Lachlan Lancaster , William Griffin , Robert H. Swendsen

A microscopic understanding of the thermodynamic entropy in quantum systems has been a mystery ever since the invention of quantum mechanics. In classical physics, this entropy is believed to be the logarithm of the volume of phase space…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2013-05-08 J. M. Deutsch , Haibin Li , Auditya Sharma

We consider a question motivated by the third law of thermodynamics: can there be a local temperature arbitrarily close to absolute zero in a nonequilibrium quantum system? We consider nanoscale quantum conductors with the source reservoir…

Mesoscale and Nanoscale Physics · Physics 2016-03-01 Abhay Shastry , Charles A. Stafford

A system composed of identical spins and described by a quantum mechanical pure state is analyzed within the statistical framework presented in Part I of this work. We explicitly derive the typical values of the entropy, of the energy, and…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2010-07-22 Barbara Fresch , Giorgio J. Moro

We review two definitions of temperature in statistical mechanics, $T_B$ and $T_G$, corresponding to two possible definitions of entropy, $S_B$ and $S_G$, known as surface and volume entropy respectively. We restrict our attention to a…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2015-12-14 Luca Cerino , Andrea Puglisi , Angelo Vulpiani

We analyze a gas of noninteracting fermions confined to a one-dimensional harmonic oscillator potential, with the aim of distinguishing between two proposed definitions of the thermodynamic entropy in the microcanonical ensemble, namely the…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2017-03-13 Kenneth J. Higginbotham , Daniel E. Sheehy

The solutions of a particle's Dirac equation contains a negative kinetic energy (NKE) branch. Such an energy spectrum has an upper limit but no lower limit, so that the system with this spectrum, called NKE system, is of negative…

General Physics · Physics 2021-06-18 Huai-Yu Wang

A bath with a negative temperature is a subject of intense debate in recent times. It raises fundamental questions not only on our understanding of negative temperature of a bath in connection with thermodynamics but also on the…

We establish an algebraic criterion which ensures the strict positivity of the entropy production in quantum models consisting of a small system coupled to thermal reservoirs at different temperatures.

Mathematical Physics · Physics 2009-11-11 Walter H. Aschbacher , Herbert Spohn

The concept of negative temperature (T < 0) is unique to quantum physics and describes systems that are hotter than any positive temperature system. For decades negative temperatures have been shown in a number of spin systems, but…

General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology · Physics 2024-02-29 Richard A. Norte

An exact reduced dynamical map along with its operator sum representation is derived for a central spin interacting with a thermal spin environment. The dynamics of the central spin shows high sustainability of quantum traits such as…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2017-11-23 Chiranjib Mukhopadhyay , Samyadeb Bhattacharya , Avijit Misra , Arun Kumar Pati

Quantum annealers are emerging as programmable, dynamical experimental platforms for probing strongly correlated spin systems. Yet key thermal assumptions, chiefly a Gibbs-distributed output ensemble, remain unverified in the large-scale…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2025-12-04 George Grattan , Pratik Sathe , Cristiano Nisoli

Cyclic classical and quantum thermal machines show higher efficiency when the strokes are carried out quasi-statically. Recent theoretical and experimental work on figures of merit for thermal machines show that they have an advantage when…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2024-04-04 Aryadine F. de Sousa , Gabriella G. Damas , Norton G. de Almeida

Temperature of a finite-sized system fluctuates due to the thermal fluctuations. However, a systematic mathematical framework for measuring or estimating the temperature is still underdeveloped. Here, we incorporate the estimation theory in…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2026-03-17 Shaoyong Zhang , Zhaoyu Fei , Xiaoguang Wang