2018/10/31 by Matteo Scandi, Martí Perarnau-Llobet · 1 citation
Physics and Astronomy · #quant-ph #cond-mat.stat-mech
paper · pdf · doi:10.22331/q-2019-10-24-197
published as Quantum 3, 197 (2019) · 22 pages, 3 figures. v5: minor corrections, accepted in Quantum
arxiv created 2019/10/14 · arxiv updated 2019/10/25
The dissipation generated during a quasistatic thermodynamic process can be characterised by introducing a metric on the space of Gibbs states, in such a way that minimally-dissipating protocols correspond to geodesic trajectories. Here, we show how to generalize this approach to open quantum systems by finding the thermodynamic metric associated to a given Lindblad master equation. The obtained metric can be understood as a perturbation over the background geometry of equilibrium Gibbs states, which is induced by the Kubo-Mori-Bogoliubov (KMB) inner product. We illustrate this construction on two paradigmatic examples: an Ising chain and a two-level system interacting with a bosonic bath with different spectral densities.