Emergence of energy-avoiding and energy-seeking behaviours in nonequilibrium dissipative quantum systems

Abstract

A longstanding challenge in nonequilibrium thermodynamics is to predict the emergence of self-organized behaviours and functionalities typical of living matter. Despite the progress with classical complex systems, it remains far from obvious how to extrapolate these results down to the quantum scale. Here, we employ the paradigmatic master equation framework to establish that some lifelike behaviours and functionalities can indeed emerge in elementary dissipative quantum systems driven out of equilibrium. Specifically, we find both energy-avoiding (low steady dissipation) and energy-seeking behaviours (high steady dissipation), as well as self-adaptive shifts between these modes, in generic few-level systems. We also find emergent functionalities, namely, a self-organized thermal gradient in the system's environment (in the energy-seeking mode) and an active equilibration against thermal gradients (in the energy-avoiding mode). Finally, we discuss the possibility that our results could be related to the concept of dissipative adaptation.

9 pages, 5 figures

References in corpus (5)

• Collective evolution and the genetic code
• Nonequilibrium Physics in Biology
• Optimal rectification by strongly coupled spins
• Energy transport between two pure-dephasing reservoirs
• Quantum dissipative adaptation

Cited by in corpus (6)

• Exact solution of a lambda quantum system driven by a two-photon wavepacket
• Quantum dissipative adaptation with cascaded photons
• Singular transport in non-equilibrium strongly internal-coupled 1D tilted field spin-1/2 chain
• Energetics of self-organization in a dissipative two-site quantum system driven by single-photon pulses
• Quantum thermophoresis
• Dissipative adaptation in a driven spin-boson model within the path-integral formalism