Related papers: Irreversible processes without energy dissipation …
In this contribution we prove that the entropy of an N-body isolated system can not decrease and the entropy production should be non-negative provided the system possesses an equilibrium state. We define the entropy as a functional of the…
The irreversible entropy increase described by the second law of thermodynamics is fundamentally tied to thermalization and the emergence of equilibrium. In the first part of our work (Ref: arXiv.2503.04152), we constructed an isolated gas…
Macroscopic many-body systems always exhibit irreversible behaviors together with the entropy increase. However, the underlying microscopic dynamics of the many-body system, either the (quantum) von Neumann or (classical) Liouville…
A generalization of the Gibbs-von Neumann relative entropy is proposed based on the quantum BBGKY [Bogolyubov-Born-Green-Kirkwood-Yvon] hierarchy as the nonequilibrium entropy for an N-body system. By using a generalization of the…
The analysis of dissipation and dephasing in driven mesoscopic devices requires a distinction between two notions of quantum irreversibility. One ("Loschmidt echo") is related to "time reversal", while the other is related to "driving…
We characterise the nonequilibrium stationary state of a generic multivariate Ornstein-Uhlenbeck process involving $N$ degrees of freedom. The irreversibility of the process is encoded in the antisymmetric part of the Onsager matrix. The…
We address the emergence of entropy production in the non-equilibrium process of an open quantum system from the viewpoint of the environment. By making use of a dilation-based approach akin to Stinespring theorem, we derive an expression…
The characterization of irreversibility in general quantum processes is an open problem of increasing techno- logical relevance. Yet, the tools currently available to this aim are mostly limited to the assessment of dynamics induced by…
We investigate temporal evolution of von Neumann's entropy in exemplary quantum mechanical systems and show that it grows in systems evolving with incrementally increasing decoherence during scattering processes. We demonstrate that the…
The dynamics of irreversible relaxation of non-equilibrium macroscopic systems is discussed. Arguments are developed showing that the general process is supported by two independent successive mechanisms. One is mixing and it follows pure…
If the von Neumann equation is modified by time dependent statistical weights, the time rate of entropy, the entropy exchange and production of a Schottky system are derived whose Hamiltonian does not contain the interaction with the…
The question of how irreversibility can emerge as a generic phenomena when the underlying mechanical theory is reversible has been a long-standing fundamental problem for both classical and quantum mechanics. We describe a mechanism for the…
It is demonstrated that, making minimal changes in ordinary quantum mechanics, a reasonable irreversible quantum mechanics can be obtained. This theory has a more general spectral decompositions, with eigenvectors corresponding to unstable…
New exact results about the nonequilibrium thermodynamics of open quantum systems at arbitrary timescales are obtained by considering all possible variations of initial conditions of a system, its environment, and correlations between them.…
We derive geometrical bounds on the irreversibility in both quantum and classical Markovian open systems that satisfy the detailed balance condition. Using information geometry, we prove that irreversible entropy production is bounded from…
The second law of thermodynamics states that the entropy of an isolated system can only increase over time. This appears to conflict with the reversible evolution of isolated quantum systems under the Schr\"odinger equation, which preserves…
The act of measuring a system has profound consequences of dynamical and thermodynamic nature. In particular, the degree of irreversibility ensuing from a non-equilibrium process is strongly affected by measurements aimed at acquiring…
A restricted form of Landauer's Principle, independent of computational considerations, is shown to hold for thermal systems by reference to the joint entropy associated with conjugate observables. It is shown that the source of the…
We derive quantum nonequilibrium equalities in absolutely irreversible processes. Here by absolute irreversibility we mean that in the backward process the density matrix does not return to the subspace spanned by those eigenvectors that…
Irreversibility, despite being a necessary condition for thermalization, still lacks a sound understanding in the context of isolated quantum many-body systems. In this work we approach this question by studying the behavior of generic…