Locality of temperature and correlations in the presence of non-zero-temperature phase transitions

TL;DR

This paper investigates whether temperature can be locally defined in a bosonic system undergoing a non-zero-temperature phase transition, finding that locality of temperature persists despite infinite-range correlations at criticality.

Contribution

It demonstrates that a form of temperature locality holds in a 3D bosonic model even at the phase transition point with infinite-range correlations.

Findings

Local temperature remains well-defined despite critical correlations.

Temperature locality holds regardless of the phase transition.

Infinite-range correlations do not prevent local temperature definition.

Abstract

While temperature is well understood as an intensive quantity in standard thermodynamics, it is less clear whether the same holds in the presence of strong correlations, especially in the case of quantum systems, which may even display correlations with no classical analogue. The problem lies in the fact that, under the presence of strong correlations, subsystems of a system in thermal equilibrium are, in general, not described by a thermal state at the same temperature as the global system and thus one cannot simply assign a local temperature to them. However, there have been identified situations in which correlations in thermal states decay sufficiently fast so that the state of their subsystems can be very well approximated by the reduced states of equilibrium systems that are only slightly bigger than the subsystems themselves, hence allowing for a valid local definition of temperature. In this work, we address the question of whether temperature is locally well defined for a bosonic system with local interactions that undergoes a phase transition at non-zero temperature. We consider a three-dimensional bosonic model in the grand canonical state and verify that a certain form of locality of temperature holds regardless of the temperature, and despite the presence of infinite-range correlations at and below the critical temperature of the phase transition.