2017/11/30 by Philipp Strasberg, Gernot Schaller, Thomas L. Schmidt +1 · 112 citations
Engineering · Physics and Astronomy · #Advanced Thermodynamics and Statistical Mechanics #Classical mechanics #Coupling (piping) #Demon #Engineering #Maxwell's demon #Mechanical engineering #Physics #Quantum many-body systems #Quantum mechanics #Quantum, superfluid, helium dynamics #Theoretical physics #cond-mat.mes-hall #cond-mat.stat-mech #quant-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physrevb.97.205405
published in Physical review. B./Physical review. B 97(20) (American Physical Society) · 18 pages incl. references, appendix and 10 figures; accepted version
arxiv created 2018/03/23 · openalex publication_date 2018/05/03 · arxiv updated 2018/05/08 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
We establish a theoretical method which goes beyond the weak-coupling and Markovian approximations while remaining intuitive, using a quantum master equation in a larger Hilbert space. The method is applicable to all impurity Hamiltonians tunnel coupled to one (or multiple) baths of free fermions. The accuracy of the method is in principle not limited by the system-bath coupling strength, but rather by the shape of the spectral density and it is especially suited to study situations far away from the wide-band limit. In analogy to the bosonic case, we call it the fermionic reaction coordinate mapping. As an application, we consider a thermoelectric device made of two Coulomb-coupled quantum dots. We pay particular attention to the regime where this device operates as an autonomous Maxwell demon shoveling electrons against the voltage bias thanks to information. Contrary to previous studies, we do not rely on a Markovian weak-coupling description. Our numerical findings reveal that in the regime of strong coupling and non-Markovianity, the Maxwell demon is often doomed to disappear except in a narrow parameter regime of small power output.