Work-distribution quantumness and irreversibility when crossing a quantum phase transition in finite time

Abstract

The thermodynamic behavior of out-of-equilibrium quantum systems in finite-time dynamics encompasses the description of energy fluctuations, which dictates a series of the system's physical properties. In addition, strong interactions in many-body systems strikingly affect the energy-fluctuation statistics along a nonequilibrium dynamics. By driving transient currents to oppose the precursor to the metal-Mott-insulator transition in a diversity of dynamical regimes, we show how increasing many-body interactions dramatically affect the statistics of energy fluctuations and, consequently, the extractable work distribution of finite Hubbard chains. Statistical properties of such distributions as its skewness with its impressive change across the transition can be related to irreversibility and entropy production. Even for slow driving rates, the quasi quantum phase transition hinders equilibration, increasing the process irreversibility, and inducing strong features in the work distribution. In the Mott-insulating phase, the work fluctuation-dissipation balance gets modified with the irreversible entropy production dominating over work fluctuations. Because of this, effects of an interaction-driven quantum phase transition on thermodynamic quantities and irreversibility must be considered in the design of protocols in small-scale devices for application in quantum technology. Eventually, such many-body effects can also be employed in work extraction and refrigeration protocols on a quantum scale.

Quantum work statistics of controlled evolutions

“…We first demonstrate that the entropy of the controlled work distribution admits a scaling in line with the predictions of the Kibble-Zurek mechanism [25,26]. This establishes that the controlled evolution provides a versatile means to study generic nonequilibrium dynamics and complements recent studies on the thermodynamics of traversing a quantum phase transition [27][28][29][30][31][32]. As a second application, we propose to use H W as a proxy for the complexity of the control by assessing the work distribution arising from different implementations of counterdiabatic driving for many-body systems.…”

Clinical value of the emergency department in screening and diagnosis of COVID-19 in China

“…The work distribution for a quantum many-body system is complex. Hence, one usually studies the moments or cumulants of work, such as the mean and variance, in analyzing the work statistics of quantum systems [59][60][61][65][66][67][68][69]. Although the work moments or cumulants can capture several features of nonequilibrium thermodynamics in a variety of many-body systems, they cannot reveal the full information included in the work distribution.…”

Long distance entanglement and high-dimensional quantum teleportation in the Fermi–Hubbard model

“…Furthermore, the intersection between quantum information theory and condensed matter physics has been a subject of interest in fermionic models. In particular, it has been shown that entanglement plays a role in the identification of the phases of matter present in the Hubbard model [54][55][56][57][58][59][60] . At the experimental level, quantum simulation of the Hubbard model using ultra cold atoms in optical lattices have been successful in observing and validating the theoretical results of strongly correlated Fermi gases 61 .…”