Path integral approach to the calculation of the characteristic function of work
Abstract
Work statistics characterizes important features of a non-equilibrium thermodynamic process. But the calculation of the work statistics in an arbitrary non-equilibrium process is usually a cumbersome task. In this work, we study the work statistics in quantum systems by employing Feynman's path-integral approach. We derive the analytical work distributions of two prototype quantum systems. The results are proved to be equivalent to the results obtained based on Schr\"{o}dinger's formalism. We also calculate the work distributions in their classical counterparts by employing the path-integral approach. Our study demonstrates the effectiveness of the path-integral approach to the calculation of work statistics in both quantum and classical thermodynamics, and brings important insights to the understanding of the trajectory work in quantum systems.
Cite
@article{arxiv.1908.09731,
title = {Path integral approach to the calculation of the characteristic function of work},
author = {Tian Qiu and Zhaoyu Fei and Rui Pan and H. T. Quan},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1908.09731},
year = {2020}
}