Dynamics and thermodynamics of linear quantum open systems

We analyze the evolution of the quantum state of networks of quantum oscillators coupled with arbitrary external environments. We show that the reduced density matrix of the network always obeys a local master equation with a simple analytical solution. We use this to study the emergence of thermody...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inPhysical review letters Vol. 110; no. 13; p. 130406
Main Authors Martinez, Esteban A, Paz, Juan Pablo
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published United States 29.03.2013
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Summary:We analyze the evolution of the quantum state of networks of quantum oscillators coupled with arbitrary external environments. We show that the reduced density matrix of the network always obeys a local master equation with a simple analytical solution. We use this to study the emergence of thermodynamical laws in the long time regime demonstrating two main results: First, we show that it is impossible to build a quantum absorption refrigerator using linear networks (thus, nonlinearity is an essential resource for such refrigerators recently studied by Levy and Kosloff [Phys. Rev. Lett. 108, 070604 (2012)] and Levy et al. [Phys. Rev. B 85, 061126 (2012)]). Then, we show that the third law imposes constraints on the low frequency behavior of the environmental spectral densities.
ISSN:1079-7114
DOI:10.1103/PhysRevLett.110.130406