Thermodynamics of decoherence

Abstract

We investigate the nonequilibrium thermodynamics of pure decoherence. In a pure decoherence process, the system Hamiltonian is a constant of motion and there is no direct energy exchange between the system and its surroundings. Nevertheless, the environment's energy is not generally conserved and in this work we show that this leads to nontrivial heat dissipation as a result of decoherence alone. This heat has some very distinctive properties: it obeys an integral fluctuation relation and can be interpreted in terms of the entropy production associated with populations in the energy eigenbasis of the initial state. We show that the heat distribution for a pure decoherence process is different from the distribution of work done by the initial system-bath interaction quench. Instead, it corresponds to a mixture of work distributions of cyclical processes, each conditioned on a state of the open system. Inspired by recent experiments on impurities in ultra-cold gases, we demonstrate our general results by studying the heat generated by the decoherence of a qubit immersed within a degenerate Fermi gas in the lowest band of a species-selective optical lattice.

v1: 4+3 pages, 3 figures. Comments welcome. v3: Final published version. Code to generate plots can be found in the arXiv source files

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• Limits on quantum measurement engines
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• Non-Markovian Quantum Heat Statistics with the Reaction Coordinate Mapping
• Local and global approaches to the thermodynamics of pure decoherence processes in open quantum systems
• Local energy assignment for two interacting quantum thermal reservoirs
• Correlated decoherence and thermometry with mobile impurities in a 1D Fermi gas
• Harnessing spin-qubit decoherence to probe strongly-interacting quantum systems
• Heat operator approach to quantum stochastic thermodynamics in the strong-coupling regime
• A signature of quantumness in pure decoherence control
• Weak continuous measurements require more work than strong ones