Open Quantum Systems at Low Temperature

TL;DR

This paper investigates how strong system-bath coupling and bath spectral properties affect quantum thermodynamics, revealing deviations from classical distributions and highlighting the importance of non-Markovian effects in quantum systems.

Contribution

It introduces an effective coupling framework that accounts for all energy scales and bath spectral density, explaining deviations from standard thermodynamics in quantum systems.

Findings

Deviations from Boltzmann distribution in quantum thermodynamics due to spectral density.

Quantum stationary entanglement can persist at high temperatures under weak coupling.

Non-Markovian interactions enhance cooling efficiency in quantum optomechanics.

Abstract

It is known that the origin of the deviations from standard thermodynamics proceed from the strong coupling to the bath. Here, it is shown that these deviations are related to the power spectrum of the bath. Specifically, it is shown that the system thermal-equilibrium-state cannot be characterized by the canonical Boltzmann's distribution in quantum mechanics. This is because the uncertainty principle imposed a lower bound of the dispersion of the total energy of the system that is dominated by the spectral density of the bath. However, in the classical case, for a wide class of systems that interact via central forces with pairwise-self-interacting environment, the system thermal equilibrium state is exactly characterized by the canonical Boltzmann distribution. As a consequence of this analysis and taking into account all energy scales in the system and reservoir interaction, an effective coupling to the environment is introduced. Sample computations in different regimes predicted by this effective coupling are shown. Specifically, in the strong coupling effective regime, the system exhibits deviations from standard thermodynamics and in the weak coupling effective regime, quantum features such as stationary entanglement are possible at high temperatures. Moreover, it is known that the spectrum of thermal baths depends on the non-Markovian character. Hence, non-Markovian interactions have a important role in the thermal equilibrium state of physical systems. For example, in quantum optomechanics is looked up to cool the mechanical system through an auxiliary system which generally is a cavity. This cooling process takes into account the non-Markovian interaction and as it is shown here, it is more effective than if we use only the Markovian approximation in the equation of motion for the different modes.