Related papers: Local Temperatures Out of Equilibrium
Measuring the local temperature of nanoscale systems out of equilibrium has emerged as a new tool to study local heating effects and other local thermal properties of systems driven by external fields. Although various experimental…
We show how the local temperature of out-of-equilibrium, quantum electron systems can be consistently defined with the help of an external voltage and temperature probe. We determine sufficient conditions under which the temperature…
We show that a local measurement of temperature and voltage for a quantum system in steady state, arbitrarily far from equilibrium, with arbitrary interactions within the system, is unique when it exists. This is interpreted as a…
A theory of local temperature measurement of an interacting quantum electron system far from equilibrium via a floating thermoelectric probe is developed. It is shown that the local temperature so defined is consistent with the zeroth,…
While temperature is well understood as an intensive quantity in standard thermodynamics, it is less clear whether the same holds in the presence of strong correlations, especially in the case of quantum systems, which may even display…
We study two small quantum systems coupled to the same reservoir which is in thermal equilibrium. By studying the particle density and the energy density in the two systems before and after they contact each other, we find that the two…
Local temperature defined by a local canonical state of the respective subsystem, does not always exist in quantum many body systems. Here, we give some examples of how this breakdown of the temperature concept on small length scales might…
Probes that measure the local thermal properties of systems out of equilibrium are emerging as new tools in the study of nanoscale systems. One can then measure the temperature of a probe that is weakly coupled to a bias-driven system. By…
A physical system is in local equilibrium if it cannot be distinguished from a global equilibrium by ``infinitesimally localized measurements''. This should be a natural characterization of local equilibrium, but the problem is to give a…
The meaning of temperature in nonequilibrium thermodynamics is considered by using a forced harmonic oscillator in a heat bath, where we have two effective temperatures for the position and the momentum, respectively. We invent a concrete…
We review the general aspects of the concept of temperature in equilibrium and non-equilibrium statistical mechanics. Although temperature is an old and well-established notion, it still presents controversial facets. After a short…
In this paper we introduce a method of calculating the local temperature and chemical potential inside a mesoscopic device out of equilibrium. We show how to check the conditions of local thermal equilibrium as the whole system is out of…
When long-range interactions are present the usual definition of temperature implies that two systems in thermal equilibrium can be at different temperatures. This local temperature has physical significance, if the sub-systems cease to…
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…
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,…
We introduce thermometers to define the local temperature of an electronic system driven out-of-equilibrium by local AC fields. We also define the effective temperature in terms of a local fluctuation-dissipation-relation. We show that…
The local entropy of a nonequilibrium system of independent fermions is investigated, and analyzed in the context of the laws of thermodynamics. It is shown that the local temperature and chemical potential can only be expressed in terms of…
The laws of thermodynamics provide a clear concept of the temperature for an equilibrium system in the continuum limit. Meanwhile, the equipartition theorem allows one to make a connection between the ensemble average of the kinetic energy…
In traditional thermodynamics, temperature is a local quantity: a subsystem of a large thermal system is in a thermal state at the same temperature as the original system. For strongly interacting systems, however, the locality of…
Temperature is usually defined for physical systems at thermal equilibrium. Nevertheless one may wonder if it would be possible to attribute a meaningful notion of temperature to an arbitrary quantum state, beyond simply the thermal (Gibbs)…