Related papers: Taking the temperature of a pure quantum state
When a quantum system is placed in thermal environments, we often assume that the system relaxes to the Gibbs state in which decoherence takes place in the system energy eigenbasis. However, when the coupling between the system and the…
A densely packed granular system is an example of an out-of-equilibrium system in the jammed state. It has been a longstanding problem to determine whether this class of systems can be described by concepts arising from equilibrium…
In an isolated quantum many-body system undergoing unitary evolution, the entropy of a subsystem (smaller than half the system size) thermalizes if at long times, it is to leading order equal to the thermodynamic entropy of the subsystem at…
The effects of the measurement apparatus on quantum coherence are studied by considering a purely dephasing model of a qubit. The initial state is prepared from a thermal state of the whole system by performing a nonselective measurement on…
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.…
Recent progress in the synthesis and processing of nano-structured materials and systems calls for an improved understanding of thermal properties on small length scales. In this context, the question whether thermodynamics and, in…
The extension of thermodynamics into the quantum regime has received much attention in recent years. A primary objective of current research is to find thermodynamic tasks which can be enhanced by quantum mechanical effects. With this goal…
Energy exchanges under form of heat is neither the most natural or efficient way to operate an engine in the quantum realm. Recently there have been in the literature several proposals for "quantum measurement engines" where energy is fed…
We investigate the experimental setup proposed in [New J. Phys., 15, 115006 (2013)] for calorimetric measurements of thermodynamic indicators in an open quantum system. As theoretical model we consider a periodically driven qubit coupled…
We study the transition probabilities of a two-point measurement on a quantum system, initially prepared in a thermal state. We find two independent constraints on the difference between transition probabilities when the system is prepared…
Understanding relaxation processes is an important unsolved problem in many areas of physics. A key challenge in studying such non-equilibrium dynamics is the scarcity of experimental tools for characterizing their complex transient states.…
We report model calculations of the time-dependent internal energy and entropy for a single quasi-free massive quantum particle at a constant temperature. We show that the whole process started from a fully coherent quantum state to…
Quantum thermalization occurs in a broad class of systems from elementary particles to complex materials. Out-of-equilibrium quantum systems have long been understood to either thermalize or retain memory of their initial states, but not…
We investigate the equilibration and thermalization properties of quantum systems interacting with a finite dimensional environment. By exploiting the concept of time averaged states, we introduce a completely positive map which allows to…
We study, from a thermodynamic perspective, the equilibrium states of a qubit interacting with an arbitrary environment of dimension N>>2. We show that even in presence of memory about the initial state, in some cases the qubit can be…
In this review, we discuss the decoherence and thermalization of a quantum spin system interacting with a spin bath environment, by numerically solving the time-dependent Schr\"{o}dinger equation of the whole system. The effects of the…
Quantum technologies use entanglement to outperform classical technologies, and often employ strong cooling and isolation to protect entangled entities from decoherence by random interactions. Here we show that the opposite strategy -…
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…
We analyze the separability of the joint state of a collection of two-level systems at finite temperature T. The fact that only separable states are found in the neighborhood of their thermal equilibrium state guarantees that decoherence…
Thermal properties of nanomaterials are crucial to not only improving our fundamental understanding of condensed matter systems, but also to developing novel materials for applications spanning research and industry. Since quantum effects…