Introduction to entropy production in thermally isolated quantum systems

• Grant number: 23/03183-0
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Scientific Initiation
• Start date: May 01, 2023
• End date: October 31, 2023
• Field of knowledge: Physical Sciences and Mathematics - Physics - General Physics
• Principal Investigator: Marcus Vinicius Segantini Bonança
• Grantee: João Vitor Massochin Steimetz
• Host Institution: Instituto de Física Gleb Wataghin (IFGW). Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP). Campinas , SP, Brazil

Abstract

Recently developed experimental techniques have provided means of controlling and trapping quantum systems at the nanoscale. In some circumstances, it is even possible to have experimental access to the quantum state of these systems. This fact has stimulated the development of an informational approach of the non-equilibrium thermodynamics of these systems. Informational quantities as the relative entropy or the Shannon-von Neumann entropy have been used to quantify, in some cases, thermodynamic quantities like the entropy production, allowing us to measure through them how irreversible a given process was. In this project, we intend to analyse via examples these informational quantifiers in processes performed on thermally isolated quantum systems. In this context of thermal isolation, it is known that such quantifiers do not lead to the correct quasistatic limit of the entropy production. Moreover, very little is known about how these quantifiers scale with the process duration in non-equilibrium regimes. We intend to tackle these questions through the numerical simulation of the time evolution of the systems of interest (whenever the exact analytical solution is absent) and corrections of to the Quantum Adiabatic Theorem to focus on the regime of slowly-varying processes.