Thermodynamics of decoherence
- URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2107.14216v3
- Date: Wed, 19 Apr 2023 09:34:32 GMT
- Title: Thermodynamics of decoherence
- Authors: Maria Popovic, Mark T. Mitchison, and John Goold
- Abstract summary: In a pure decoherence process, the system Hamiltonian is a constant of motion and there is no direct energy exchange between the system and its surroundings.
We show that this leads to nontrivial heat dissipation as a result of decoherence alone.
- Score: 0.0
- License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
- Abstract: We investigate the nonequilibrium thermodynamics of pure decoherence. In a
pure decoherence process, the system Hamiltonian is a constant of motion and
there is no direct energy exchange between the system and its surroundings.
Nevertheless, the environment's energy is not generally conserved and in this
work we show that this leads to nontrivial heat dissipation as a result of
decoherence alone. This heat has some very distinctive properties: it obeys an
integral fluctuation relation and can be interpreted in terms of the entropy
production associated with populations in the energy eigenbasis of the initial
state. We show that the heat distribution for a pure decoherence process is
different from the distribution of work done by the initial system-bath
interaction quench. Instead, it corresponds to a mixture of work distributions
of cyclical processes, each conditioned on a state of the open system. Inspired
by recent experiments on impurities in ultra-cold gases, we demonstrate our
general results by studying the heat generated by the decoherence of a qubit
immersed within a degenerate Fermi gas in the lowest band of a
species-selective optical lattice.
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