Currents and fluctuations of quantum heat transport in harmonic chains

Abstract

Heat transport in open quantum systems is particularly susceptible to the modeling of system-reservoir interactions. It thus requires to consistently treat the coupling between a quantum system and its environment. While perturbative approaches are successfully used in fields like quantum optics and quantum information, they reveal deficiencies, typically in the context of thermodynamics, when it is essential to respect additional criteria such as fluctuation-dissipation theorems. We use a non-perturbative approach for quantum dissipative dynamics based on a stochastic Liouville-von Neumann equation to provide a very general and extremely efficient formalism for heat currents and its correlations in open harmonic chains. Specific results are derived not only for first but also for second order moments which requires to account for both real and imaginary parts of bath-bath correlation functions. Spatiotemporal patterns are compared with weak coupling calculations. The regime of stronger system-reservoir couplings gives rise to an intimate interplay between reservoir fluctuations and heat transfer far from equilibrium.

21 pages, 5 figures. v2: minor corrections, additional references

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• Single ion heat engine with maximum efficiency at maximum power
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• Thermal transport in out of equilibrium quantum harmonic chains
• New analytic solution for the heat flow through a general harmonic network
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Cited by in corpus (5)

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• Pushing the limits of the reaction-coordinate mapping
• Entangled system-and-environment dynamics: Phase-space dissipaton theory
• Active energy transport and the role of symmetry breaking in microscopic power grid
• Nonequilibrium Steady State and Heat Transport in Nonlinear Open Quantum Systems: Stochastic Influence Action and Functional Perturbative Analysis