The thermodynamic meaning of local temperature of nonequilibrium open quantum systems

Abstract

Measuring the local temperature of nanoscale systems out of equilibrium has emerged as a new tool to study local heating effects and other local thermal properties of systems driven by external fields. Although various experimental protocols and theoretical definitions have been proposed to determine the local temperature, the thermodynamic meaning of the measured or defined quantities remains unclear. By performing analytical and numerical analysis of bias-driven quantum dot systems both in the noninteracting and strongly-correlated regimes, we elucidate the underlying physical meaning of local temperature as determined by two definitions: the zero-current condition that is widely used but not measurable, and the minimal-perturbation condition that is experimentally realizable. We show that, unlike the zero-current one, the local temperature determined by the minimalperturbation protocol establishes a quantitative correspondence between the nonequilibrium system of interest and a reference equilibrium system, provided the probed system observable and the related electronic excitations are fully local. The quantitative correspondence thus allows the well-established thermodynamic concept to be extended to nonequilibrium situations.

15 pages, 5 figures

References in corpus (13)

• Vibrational and electronic heating in nanoscale junctions
• Heat conduction in molecular transport junctions
• Hierarchical Liouville-space approach for accurate and universal characterization of quantum impurity systems
• Electrically driven thermal light emission from individual single-walled carbon nanotubes
• Resonant electron heating and molecular phonon cooling in single C${}_{60}$ junctions
• Many-body theory of electronic transport in single-molecule heterojunctions
• Existence of temperature on the nanoscale
• Local temperatures of strongly-correlated quantum dots out of equilibrium
• Luttinger-field approach to thermoelectric transport in nanoscale conductors
• The formation of nonequilibrium steady states in interacting double quantum dots: When coherences dominate the charge distribution
• Local Temperatures and Heat Flow in Quantum Driven Systems
• Thermoelectric Corrections to Quantum Voltage Measurement
• Information compressibility, entropy production and approach to steady state in open systems

Cited by in corpus (8)

• Local Temperatures Out of Equilibrium
• Nonequilibrium open quantum systems with multiple bosonic and fermionic environments: A hierarchical equations of motion approach
• Scanning probe-induced thermoelectrics in a quantum point contact
• Current-induced one-dimensional diffusion of Co ad-atoms on graphene nanoribbons
• Effect of quantum resonances on local temperature in nonequilibrium open systems
• Geometry-based circulation of local thermal current in quantum harmonic and Bose Hubbard systems
• Performance of the T-matrix based master equation for Coulomb drag in double quantum dots
• Direct temperature readout in nonequilibrium quantum thermometry