Correlation-Enabled Energy Exchange in Quantum Systems without External Driving

TL;DR

This paper explores how correlations alone can drive energy exchange in bipartite quantum systems without external work, revealing conditions where energy transfer is solely due to changes in correlations.

Contribution

It identifies conditions under which energy exchange occurs only through correlation changes, and demonstrates the limitations within GKLS dynamics for such scenarios.

Findings

Energy exchange can be driven solely by correlation changes.

Local energies can remain constant under specific initial states.

Such correlation-driven energy exchange is not always possible for all states.

Abstract

We study the role of correlation in mechanisms of energy exchange between an interacting bipartite quantum system and its environment by decomposing the energy of the system to local and correlation-related contributions. When the system Hamiltonian is time-independent, no external work is performed. In this case, energy exchange between the system and its environment occurs only due to the change in the state of the system. We investigate possibility of a special case where the energy exchange with the environment occurs exclusively due to changes in the correlation between the constituent parts of the bipartite system, while their local energies remain constant. We find sufficient conditions for preserving local energies. It is proven that under these conditions and within the Gorini-Kossakowski-Lindblad-Sudarshan (GKLS) dynamics this scenario is not possible for all initial states of the bipartite system. Nevertheless, it is still possible to find special initial states for which the local energies remain unchanged during the associated evolution and the whole energy exchange is only due to the change in the correlation energy. We illustrate our results with an example.