Related papers: {\it Colloquium:} Statistical Mechanics and Thermo…
Ability of dynamical systems to relax to equilibrium has been investigated since the invention of statistical mechanics, which establishes the connection between dynamics of many-body Hamiltonian systems and phenomenological thermodynamics.…
A few decades after Hill's work on nano-thermodynamics, the development of a thermodynamic framework, to account consistently for the fluctuations of small systems due to their interactions with the surrounding environment, is still…
By solving the exact master equation of open quantum systems, we formulate the quantum thermodynamics from weak to strong couplings. The open quantum systems exchange matters, energies and information with their reservoirs through quantum…
Two approaches to describe the thermodynamics of a subsystem that interacts with a thermal bath are considered. Within the first approach, the mean system energy $E_{S}$ is identified with the expectation value of the system Hamiltonian,…
For studying the thermodynamic properties of systems using statistical mechanics we propose an ensemble that lies in between the familiar canonical and microcanonical ensembles. From a comparative study of these ensembles we conclude that…
Using the system-bath model Hamiltonian this thesis covers the equilibrium and out of equilibrium properties of quantum open systems. Topics included are the calculation of thermodynamical quantities of open systems, derivation of quantum…
The thermodynamics of small quantum many-body systems strongly coupled to a heat bath at low temperatures with non-Markovian behavior are new challenges for quantum thermodynamics, as traditional thermodynamics is built on large systems…
It is known that the origin of the deviations from standard thermodynamics proceed from the strong coupling to the bath. Here, it is shown that these deviations are related to the power spectrum of the bath. Specifically, it is shown that…
We introduce the idea of weakly coherent collisional models, where the elements of an environment interacting with a system of interest are prepared in states that are approximately thermal, but have an amount of coherence proportional to a…
The consistent definition of the thermodynamic functions of small open quantum systems in contact with an environment in equilibrium with a heat bath has been the subject of many debates in the quantum community. In the present work we…
We argue here that, as it happens in Classical and Quantum Mechanics, where it has been proven that alternative Hamiltonian descriptions can be compatible with a given set of equations of motion, the same holds true in the realm of…
The basic idea of a microscopic understanding of Thermodynamics is to derive its main features from a microscopic probability distribution. In such a vein, we investigate the thermal statistics of quasi-probabilities's semi-classical…
Thermodynamics entails a set of mathematical conditions on quantum Markovian dynamics. In particular, strict energy conservation between the system and environment implies that the dissipative dynamical map commutes with the unitary system…
Equilibrium statistics of finite Hamiltonian systems is fundamentally described by the microcanonical ensemble (ME). Canonical, or grand-canonical partition functions are deduced from this by Laplace transform. Only in the thermodynamic…
A general thermodynamic framework is presented for open quantum systems in fixed contact with a thermal reservoir. The first and second law are obtained for arbitrary system-reservoir coupling strengths, and including both factorized and…
A didactic description of the thermodynamic properties of classical spin systems is given in terms of their quantum counterpart in the Hamiltonian limit. Emphasis is on the construction of the relevant Hamiltonian, and the calculation of…
A key objective in nuclear and high-energy physics is to describe nonequilibrium dynamics of matter, e.g., in the early universe and in particle colliders, starting from the Standard Model. Classical-computing methods, via the framework of…
We show that classical thermodynamics has a formulation in terms of Hamilton-Jacobi theory, analogous to mechanics. Even though the thermodynamic variables come in conjugate pairs such as pressure/volume or temperature/entropy, the phase…
We establish a connection between ground states of local quantum Hamiltonians and thermal states of classical spin systems. For any discrete classical statistical mechanical model in any spatial dimension, we find an associated quantum…
Descriptions of molecular systems usually refer to two distinct theoretical frameworks. On the one hand the quantum pure state, i.e. the wavefunction, of an isolated system which is determined to calculate molecular properties and to…