Dynamics and thermodynamics of liner quantum open systems

ESTEBAN MARTINEZ; JUAN PABLO PAZ

PHYSICAL REVIEW LETTERS

AMER PHYSICAL SOC

Lugar: New York; Año: 2013 vol. 110 p. 130406 - 130408

0031-9007

We analyze the behavior of a network of quantum oscillators coupled with a number of external environments. We show that the dynamics is such that the quantum state of the network always obeys a local master equation with a simple analytical solution. We use this to study the emergence of thermodynamical laws in the stationary (long time) regime. We show the validity of the second law and using the same tools we demonstrate the impossibility of building a quantum absorption refrigerator (therefore, such refrigerators requires non-linearity as an crucial ingredient, as recently proposed by Koslov and others [2]). We also show that the third law imposes strong constraints on the low frequency behavior of the environmental spectral densities.