2017/09/07 by S. Marcantoni, S. Alipour, F. Benatti +2
Physics and Astronomy · #Advanced Thermodynamics and Statistical Mechanics #Detailed balance #Dissipative system #Entropy (arrow of time) #Entropy production #Joint quantum entropy #Quantum many-body systems #Quantum relative entropy #Second law of thermodynamics #Semigroup #Statistical Mechanics and Entropy #quant-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.1038/s41598-017-12595-x
published as Sci. Rep. 7, 12447 (2017) · 10 pages, 1 figure, accepted in Scientific Reports
arxiv created 2017/09/07 · openalex created_date 2017/09/15 · openalex publication_date 2017/09/25 · arxiv updated 2017/10/03 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/06
In the weak-coupling limit approach to open quantum systems, the presence of the bath is eliminated and accounted for by a master equation that introduces dissipative contributions to the system reduced dynamics: within this framework, there are no bath entropy contributions to the entropy balance. We show that, as a consequence, the entropy production fails to be positive for a class of physically legitimate, that is completely positive and trace preserving, non-Markovian dynamical maps. Moreover, in absence of the semigroup property, if the reduced dynamics has a thermal asymptotic state, this need not be stationary. Then even the integrated entropy production becomes negative. These observations imply that, when the conditions leading to reduced dynamics of semigroup type are relaxed, a consistent formulation of the second law of thermodynamics requires that the environment contribution to the entropy balance be explicitly taken into account.