Related papers: {\it Colloquium:} Statistical Mechanics and Thermo…
A pedagogical derivation of statistical mechanics from quantum mechanics is provided, by means of open quantum systems. Besides, a new definition of Boltzmann entropy for a quantum closed system is also given to count microstates in a way…
The dynamical convergence of a system to the thermal distribution, or Gibbs state, is a standard assumption across all of the physical sciences. The Gibbs state is determined just by temperature and the system's energies alone. But at…
Conventional thermo-statistics address infinite homogeneous systems within the canonical ensemble. (Only in this case this is equivalent to the fundamental microcanonical ensemble.) However, some 170 years ago the original motivation of…
The grand canonical ensemble lies at the core of quantum and classical statistical mechanics. A small system thermalizes to this ensemble while exchanging heat and particles with a bath. A quantum system may exchange quantities represented…
Gibbs and Boltzmann definitions of temperature agree only in the macroscopic limit. The ambiguity in identifying the equilibrium temperature of a finite sized `small' system exchanging energy with a bath is usually understood as a…
Equilibrium statistics of Hamiltonian systems is correctly described by the microcanonical ensemble. Classically this is the manifold of all points in the $N-$body phase space with the given total energy. Due to Boltzmann's principle,…
The thermodynamics and the dynamics of particle systems with infinite-range coupling display several unusual and new features with respect to systems with short-range interactions. The Hamiltonian Mean Field (HMF) model represents a…
This article sets up a formalism to describe stochastic thermodynamics for driven out-of-equilibrium open quantum systems. A stochastic Schr\"odinger equation allows to construct quantum trajectories describing the dynamics of the system…
Thermodynamic quantities, like heat, entropy, or work, are random variables, in stochastic systems. Here, we investigate the statistics of the heat exchanged by a Brownian particle subjected to a logarithm-harmonic potential. We derive…
An analytical method to compute thermodynamic properties of a given Hamiltonian system is proposed. This method combines ideas of both dynamical systems and ensemble approaches to thermodynamics, providing de facto a possible alternative to…
Quantum thermodynamics with open systems is often based on the quantum optical weak-coupling master equation or on operational repeated interaction models, whereas early works on thermalisation and on decoherence theory were mostly…
Focusing on isolated macroscopic systems, described either in terms of a quantum mechanical or a classical model, our two key questions are: In how far does an initial ensemble (usually far from equilibrium and largely unknown in detail)…
We design several examples of constrained, symmetric quantum circuit dynamics that generate non-equilibrium steady states. The qubit networks maintain local memory of the initial conditions and display inhomogeneous subsystem dynamics over…
The thermodynamics for a system with given temperature, density, and volume is described by the Canonical ensemble. The thermodynamics for a corresponding system with the same temperature, volume, and average density is described by the…
Thermodynamical equilibrium is considered as an effect of quantum entangling of the vacuum state of a system. An explicit mathematical model of multi- particle entangled pure quantum states is developed and analyzed. In the framework, the…
We derive a thermodynamic uncertainty relation for general open quantum dynamics, described by a joint unitary evolution on a composite system comprising a system and an environment. By measuring the environmental state after the…
Heat and work are fundamental concepts for thermodynamical systems. When these are scaled down to the quantum level they require appropriate embeddings. Here we show that the dependence of the particle spectrum on system size giving rise to…
In a first part the scope of classical thermodynamics and statistical mechanics is discussed in the broader context of formal dynamical systems, including computer programmes. In this context classical thermodynamics appears as a particular…
The role of quantum entanglement in thermodynamical systems remains elusive. Does entanglement result in thermodynamic advantages or does it impose fundamental limitations? Here, we unambiguously quantify the amount of heat and work in a…
The dynamics and the thermodynamics of particles/spins interacting via long-range forces display several unusual features with respect to systems with short-range interactions. The Hamiltonian Mean Field (HMF) model, a Hamiltonian system of…