Related papers: Non-equilibrium quantum systems: Divergence betwee…
In this work we investigate the relation between quantum measurements and decoherence, in order to formally express the necessity of the latter for obtaining an informative output from the former. To this aim, referring to the Von Neumann…
The temperature of a physical system is operationally defined in physics as "that quantity which is measured by a thermometer" weakly coupled to, and at equilibrium with the system. This definition is unique only at global equilibrium in…
Physical systems in real life are inextricably linked to their surroundings and never completely separated from them. Truly closed systems do not exist. The phenomenon of decoherence, which is brought about by the interaction with the…
Describing open quantum systems far from equilibrium is challenging, in particular when the environment is mesoscopic, when it develops nonequilibrium features during the evolution, or when the memory effects cannot be disregarded. Here, we…
The decay of photoexcited quantum systems (examples are photodissociation of molecules and autoionization of atoms) can be viewed as a half-collision process (an incoming photon excites the system which subsequently decays by dissociation…
We study the steady state of a three-level system in contact with a non-equilibrium environment, which is composed of two independent heat baths at different temperatures. We derive a master equation to describe the non-equilibrium process…
To describe the nonequilibrium states of a system we introduce a new thermodynamic parameter - the lifetime of a system. The statistical distributions which can be obtained out of the mesoscopic description characterizing the behaviour of a…
Exchange of information between a quantum system and its surrounding environment plays a fundamental role in the study of the dynamics of open quantum systems. Here we discuss the role of the information exchange in the non-Markovian…
We discuss the non-equilibrium critical phenomena in liquids, and the models for these phenomena based on local equilibrium and extended scaling assumptions. Special situations are proposed for experimental tests of the theory.…
Recently, there have been significant new insights concerning conditions under which closed systems equilibrate locally. The question if subsystems thermalize---if the equilibrium state is independent of the initial state---is however much…
Although nonequilibrium work and fluctuation relations have been studied in detail within classical statistical physics, extending these results to open quantum systems has proven to be conceptually difficult. For systems that undergo…
An open question of fundamental importance in thermodynamics is how to describe the fluctuations of work for quantum coherent processes. In the standard approach, based on a projective energy measurement both at the beginning and at the end…
Scaling ideas and renormalization group approaches proved crucial for a deep understanding and classification of critical phenomena in thermal equilibrium. Over the past decades, these powerful conceptual and mathematical tools were…
We introduce the concept of fidelity for dynamical maps in an open quantum system scenario. We derive an inequality linking this quantity to the distinguishability of the inducing environmental states. Our inequality imposes constraints on…
We study an arbitrary non-equilibrium dynamics of a quantum bipartite system coupled to a reservoir. For its characterization, we present a fluctuation theorem (FT) that explicitly addresses the quantum correlation of subsystems during the…
We introduce a quantum measurement process that is capable of characterizing an unknown state of a system almost without disturbing or collapsing it. The underlying idea is to extract information of a system from the thermodynamic…
This work presents a general unifying theoretical framework for quantum non-equilibrium systems. It is based on a re-statement of the dynamical problem as one of inferring the distribution of collision events that move a system toward…
Open quantum systems are highly relevant, both for practical applications as well as for fundamental questions about the nature of information and its transfer, encompassing for example decoherence and memory effects. Quantum mechanics…
A sweep through a quantum phase transition by means of a time-dependent external parameter (e.g., pressure) entails non-equilibrium phenomena associated with a break-down of adiabaticity: At the critical point, the energy gap vanishes and…
There has been rapid development of systems that yield strong interactions between freely propagating photons in one dimension via controlled coupling to quantum emitters. This raises interesting possibilities such as quantum information…