Thermodynamic length in open quantum systems
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 system...
Main Authors: | , |
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Format: | Article |
Language: | English |
Published: |
Verein zur Förderung des Open Access Publizierens in den Quantenwissenschaften
2019-10-01
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Series: | Quantum |
Online Access: | https://quantum-journal.org/papers/q-2019-10-24-197/pdf/ |
Summary: | 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. |
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ISSN: | 2521-327X |