25.10.22 - Alessandra Colla "Open System Quantum Thermodynamics"

 

While quantum thermodynamics is gathering more and more popularity as an emerging field, its foundations and assumptions are still being debated. In particular, the interaction energy between a quantum system and its environment cannot be safely neglected and must be taken into account. We propose here a strategy to identify how interaction with a thermal bath changes the energy of an open quantum system: based on the existence of an exact time local master equation, we define an effective energy operator and derive fundamental thermodynamic quantities such as work, heat, and entropy production. We derive the first and second law of thermodynamics, and study the connection between violations of the second law and quantum non-Markovianity. Furthermore, we investigate how the presence of initial system-bath correlations may affect the theory and its results.