Entropy production quantifiers in thermally isolated systems

• Grant number: 23/16738-0
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Master
• Start date: September 01, 2024
• End date: February 28, 2026
• 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
• Associated research grant: 22/15453-0 - Correlated quantum materials, AP.TEM

Abstract

Recent experimental developments have allowed high control on quantum systems at the nanoscale. In some circumstances, it is even possible to have experimental access to the quantum state of these systems of few particles. Along with other factors, this has stimulated the development of an informational approach to the non-equilibrium thermodynamics of these systems. Informational quantities as the relative entropy or the Shannon-von Neumann entropy have shown themselves, in certain situations, to be quantifiers of thermodynamic quantities such as the entropy production, enabling for instance to measure the degree of irreversibility of a given process using them. In this project, we intend to compare informational and thermodynamic quantifiers of entropy production along processes performed on thermally isolated quantum systems. In this context of thermal isolation, it is known that certin informational quantifiers do not furnish the correct quasistatic limit for the entropy production. Besides, very little is known about how these quantifiers scale with the duration process in regimes out of equilibrium. We intend to tackle these questions using numerical tools to simulate the time evolution of the systems of interest (whenever the exact analytical solution is absent) and Adiabatic Perturbation Theory to study analytically the regime of slowly-varying processes.